In this lesson we will look at how to return multiple values from functions in PHP.

Consider this simple function which adds 2 numbers together and returns the result:

You can find more details about the above simple function in this article.

Now, what if we wanted to add, subtract, and multiply 2 numbers and return the 3 answers.

In order to do this we can use an array and store the 3 answers in the array as follows:

Line 3: we have a function called calculate and it accepts 2 arguments which we are assigning to variables $number1 and $number2

Line 5: we are adding the 2 numbers and assigning the answer to $add

Line 6: we are subtracting the 2 numbers and assigning the answer to $subtract

Line 7: we are multiplying the 2 numbers and assigning the answer to $multiply

Line 8: we are returning an array with the 3 answers

Line 12: we print the returned array after called the calculate function with arguments 3 and 5

The output will look like this:

We can see the 3 answers from adding, subtracting and multiplying 3 and 5.

In order to output the results in a nicer way we could do something like this:

The output would be:

We could even create a loop and do something like this:

The important thing to remember is that the array position starts at 0, not 1.

On line 13 I have declared another array to store the operators.

On line 16 I have started a simple loop to go through each of the answers and echo out the results.  This works because I know what operators are in the function.

The are many other ways we could approach this problem...but, why make things more complicated than they need to be!