Creating Functions¶

You’ve come a long way already, which has included using a bunch of built-in functions. Now it’s time to make our own!

The first thing our PHP code does is read our pets.json file and decode it into an array, which we set on our $pets variable. Let’s invent a new function called get_pets that will do this work for us and return the finished array. Custom functions are used just like core PHP functions, so eventually I want our code to look like this:

<?php
// $petsJson = file_get_contents('data/pets.json');
// $pets = json_decode($petsJson, true);
$pets = get_pets();

// ...

Oh, and those two slash marks (//) are one of the two ways you can comment out lines in PHP. Anything on a line after // is ignored by PHP entirely. This is handy for temporarily removing code or writing little love notes to your fellow developers.

Our new function can live anywhere in this file, but let’s put it at the top and out of the way. Creating a function is really easy: just say function, give it a name, add a set of parenthesis, and finish with a set of opening and closing curly braces like we do with our 2 other special language constructs: if and foreach:

// index.php
// ...

<?php
function get_pets()
{

}

// $petsJson = file_get_contents('data/pets.json');
// ...

When we call this function, any code between the curly braces will be executed. Remember, the job of a function is usually to do some work and return a value. Eventually, we’ll return an array of pets. But to get things working, just return a string by writing return, the string, then ending things with our usual semicolon:

// index.php
// ...

function get_pets()
{
    return 'woohoo';
}

To debug this, we’ll of course var_dump the $pets variable, since it’s set to the return value of our function. When we refresh, our string is dumped, proving that our function is working!

Now, just copy in the logic from before and make sure the function returns the array after decoding the string:

// index.php
// ...

function get_pets()
{
    $petsJson = file_get_contents('data/pets.json');
    $pets = json_decode($petsJson, true);

    return $pets;
}

When we refresh, the whole system works! If you’re wondering why this helped us, you’ll see in a moment.