Does PHP have "named parameters" so that early arguments can be omitted and later arguments can be written? [duplicate]

Question

In PHP you can call a function with no arguments passed in so long as the arguments have default values like this:

function test($t1 ='test1',$t2 ='test2',$t3 ='test3')
{
    echo "$t1, $t2, $t3";
}
test();

However, let's just say I want the last one to be different but the first two parameters should use their default values. The only way I can think of is by doing this with no success:

test('test1','test2','hi i am different');

I tried this:

test(,,'hi i am different');
test(default,default,'hi i am different');

Is there clean, valid way to do this?

Answer 1

Use arrays :

function test($options = array()) {
    $defaults = array(
        't1' => 'test1',
        't2' => 'test2',
        't3' => 'test3',
    );
    $options = array_merge($defauts, $options);
    extract($options);
    echo "$t1, $t2, $t3";
}

Call your function this way :

test(array('t3' => 'hi, i am different'));

Answer 2

You can't do that using raw PHP. You can try something like:

function test($var1 = null, $var2 = null){
    if($var1 == null) $var1 = 'default1';
    if($var2 == null) $var2 = 'default2';
}

and then call your function, with null as the identifier of the default variable. You can also use an array with the default values, that will be easier with a bigger parameter list.

Even better is to try to avoid this all, and rethink your design a bit.