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Pulling in $_POST or $_GET variables can be quite a pain sometimes, enter a handy built-in PHP function: extract()

Let's pretend your making a contact form, that when a user clicks submit goes to "process_contact.php" That would mean that your query string would look something like this:

Typically you would have to do the following:

That's not bad for just three items but what if it was an online survey and you wanted to gather all the $_GET data from that? Wouldn't it be nice if PHP could automate it for you?

It can. With 1 (yes that's right 1) line of code.

That function, which is a built-in PHP function by the way is extracting all the query string variables (in our case: name, email & message) and setting them equal to their respective values (in our case: Some Visitor, visitor@domain.com, Hello World)
So to access those variables we just do this:

The EXTR_PREFIX_SAME is basically saying if Joe Programmer has already made a variable called $name (or any other that would exactly match one from the query string) Then we are going to prefix it with "var"

Here is an example:

And one last cool thing about extract(); It will work with ANY array.
Example:

How sweet is that? Enjoy.

For more info about extract(); be sure to check out the manual (www.php.net)