How to easily overwrite/change multiple php variables

I'm building a pdf with php and noticed that my strings didn't work, because they were in the UTF-8 Format. utf8_decode($str) works fine but I have plenty of variables that I would have to decode this way. My code looks something like this:

function makePDF(titleStr, bodyStr, headerStr, and more...)
{

   //TO-DO

   $pdf->Cell(20, 6, $titleStr, 1, 1, 'L', false);
   $pdf->Cell(15, 6, $bodyStr, 1, 1, 'L', true);
   $pdf->Cell(50, 6, $headerStr, 1, 1, 'R', false);
}

I want to find a way to decode them all at once in a loop or something without having to do this for each variable or changing any other code that I already have:

$titleStr = utf8_decode($titleStr);
$bodyStr  = utf8_decode($bodyStr);
...and so on

Anyone an idea how to do this more easily?

Solution

You can read all of your function's arguments with func_get_args() to retrieve them, array_map() to apply the UTF8 decoding, and list() read them back into simple string variables.

<?php

function makePDF($titleStr, $bodyStr, $headerStr)
{
    $args = func_get_args();

    $args = array_map(function($args){
        return utf8_decode($args);
    }, $args);

    list($titleStr, $bodyStr, $headerStr) = $args;

    var_dump($titleStr);
    var_dump($bodyStr);
    var_dump($headerStr);
}

makePDF('foo', 'bar', 'baz');

Outputs:

string(3) "foo" 
string(3) "bar" 
string(3) "baz"

You will need to copy/paste your method signature into the list() call, but that's fairly simple.

For fun, if you want to skip the copy/paste step, you can switch in func_get_args() for get_defined_vars() and use variable variables to reassign the arguments:

<?php

function makePDF($titleStr, $bodyStr, $headerStr)
{
    $args = get_defined_vars();

    $args = array_map(function($args){
        return utf8_decode($args) . rand(0,10);
    }, $args);

    foreach($args as $key => $arg){
        // The two $$ show that this is a variable variable.
        $$key = $arg;
    }

    var_dump($titleStr);
    var_dump($bodyStr);
    var_dump($headerStr);
}

makePDF('foo', 'bar', 'baz');

string(4) "foo5"
string(4) "bar5"
string(4) "baz9"

*I've added rand() in the array_map() callable to demonstrate that the assignment is actually taking place here.