Page 187 - Beginning PHP 5.3

Chapter 7: Functions
When the PHP engine encounters the return statement, it immediately exits the function and returns
value back to the code that called the function, which can then use the value as required.

The following example script shows how to define and use a function that returns a value:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd” >
< html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en” >
< head >
< title > Normal and bold text < /title >
< link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”common.css” / >
< /head >
< body >
< h1 > Normal and bold text < /h1 >
< ?php

function makeBold( $text ) {
return “ < b > $text < /b > ”;
}
$normalText = “This is normal text.”;
$boldText = makeBold( “This is bold text.” );
echo “ < p > $normalText < /p > ”;
echo “ < p > $boldText < /p > ”;
>
?

< /body >
< /html >
This script defines a function, makeBold() , that accepts a string argument and returns the string
enclosed by HTML < b > ... < /b > (bold) tags. It then creates a variable, $normalText , containing an
unformatted string of text. Then it calls the makeBold() function, passing it some text to format, and
stores the return value from makeBold() in another variable, $boldText . Finally, the script outputs
both $normalText and $boldText to the browser.

You can see the result in Figure 7 - 3 .

Figure 7-3

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