Today I was re-factoring code on one of my online games websites. I try to make my sites as modular as possible, using a lot of constants that are extracted into a config.php file.
After trying to extract an array into a constant, I was getting the following warning:
Constants may only evaluate to scalar values
It turns out that define() supports only definitions that include scalar values, and not arrays. The methods I thought of for circumventing this restriction include:
- Define your array as a delimited string, then split it afterwards using
explode(). - Do not use
define(), but rather create a database table and select the values with SQL. This still achieves the component of modularity, but it involves running an extra query. - Don’t make it a constant and just hard code the array.