$_GET[$a]; doesn't work, but $a is a defined variable.

[dmsuperman]

$prefsFile = file("prefs.txt");
$a = $prefsFile[0];
$action = $_GET[$a];

That is a snippet of a code I am making, and I can say I'm not PHP stupid but this is really perplexing me. $prefsFile works fine, $a even works, but $action doesn't. I tried echoing it but it didn't work. Currently $a is defined as action, and when I go to ?action=meh it won't echo meh or anything. Any ideas?

[launchcode]

<?php
    $a = 'action';
    $action = $_GET[$a];
    print_r($_GET);
    echo $action;
?>

Works fine for me - I don't think there is anything wrong with the code you posted - could the error come from somewhere else? Dump out the values of $_GET and see what it contains and then dump out the $prefsFile array to see what that contains, just to double-check (print_r() will output an array).

[dmsuperman]

I'm not really sure what that does, but this is what it outputs when going to action=hello:
Array ( [action] => hello ) hello

I can post the whole code if you want, maybe it's something else. Sorry if I'm causing any problems but I'm a horrible debugger, especially in PHP which I'm fairly new to.

[dmsuperman]

I figured it out, but it was pretty stupid. I was unaware that using file() left the \n's in there, so it wasn't working because I wasn't going to action\n=

I changed file() to explode("\n", file_get_contents());

[launchcode]

Rather than explode you could trim() the variable, same end result, less processing.