Arrays/variables don't write inside function?

[Iceman90]

I am having a bit of a brain freeze today. I am writing a function, and as part of the function, I want a counter to be incriminated, and a record added to my function. This should run after a form is submitted, so it checks how many name/email combos have been submitted, and ads them to the array accordingly.

The code I have, looks like this

$i=0;
$people = array();
if(isset($_POST['submitMe'])){
	function writeArray($name,$email){
		$i++;
		echo $i;
		$people[$name] = $email;
		print_r($people);
	}
 
	if($_POST['name1']!=NULL){
		writeArray($_POST['name1'],$_POST['email1']);
	}
	if($_POST['name2']!=NULL){
		writeArray($_POST['name2'],$_POST['email2']);
	}
}

So if in the form, I enter a name into both name 1 and 2 fields, I'll get output like this:

1Array ( [Dan Smith] => dan.smith@example.com )
1Array ( [Joe Blow] => joe@blow.com )

It seems to not save the previous name, and just creates a new array with 1 user. The counter is also not incremented. How can I get my counter to show 2, and both of these gentlemen's names to be shown?

[Dan Grossman]

This is what's called scope. The $i and $people in your function are local variables. They are not the $i and $people you're using outside of the function. The variables are in different scopes; literally, they are part of two different symbol tables for the interpreter. If you want to modify them, either pass them in by reference, or make the pair a return value.

You can bring the other variables into scope by making them globals, but unnecessary use of global variables leads to messy, hard to maintain code.

    function writeArray($name,$email){
        global $i;
        global $people;
        $i++;
        echo $i;
        $people[$name] = $email;
        print_r($people);
    } 

versus

function writeArray($people, $name, $email) {
...

return $people;
}

$people = writeArray($people, $name, $email); 

If $i just keeps track of the size of the array, count($people) would give you that directly.

[Iceman90]

Thanks Dan. Very helpful.