including code in a php configuration file

Question

The ability to have closures is pretty new, so I'm not sure if there is a "standard way" to do this yet but...

Is there a good way to include a function in a PHP configuration file? Right now, the project I'm working on uses JSON for the configuration files, but I can't see any way to include PHP functions in it.

I'd like to be able to do something like this (using JSON syntax)

---

conf file:

{
    myFunc: function($arg) {
        return $arg . ' is an argument';
    }
}

application:

json_with_func_literal_decode(...);

---

It doesn't have to use JSON syntax, although that'd be nice. Speed is not really a concern as long as it's reasonable. I would like to avoid the use of eval(), which is the obvious solution to this problem.

Answer 1

You could simply use a PHP file without the overhead of parsing JSON/YAML for configuration like so:

<?php
return array(
    'foo' => 'bar',
    'myFunc' => function()
    {
        // ...
    }
);

And retrieve the configuration like so:

$config = include 'config.php';