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To: Joe Watkins <pthreads@pthreads.org>
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Date: Sun, 04 May 2014 17:46:03 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Is it possible to get the variable name from the
 HashTable structure?
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Sun, 2014-05-04 at 16:13 +0100, Joe Watkins wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-05-04 at 20:21 +0800, Aaron Lewis wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > So PHP uses HashTable to store variables like $_POST,
> > 
> > From a HashTable structure, can I get the array name?

No, a zval (which might point to a hash tale) doesn't refer to a name.
For one there in 99.99% is no need but it would cost memory(and CPU
cycles to maintain) and then there miht e multiple nae (references) or
none (temporaries etc.)

If you know the parent such hacks like 

> https://gist.github.com/krakjoe/50603be7ffb1ae6e9156

might work, but even this solution is flawed: The easy thing it doesn't
support is references, it should return an array of all names. It won't
work for complex things, though.

If you need such a functionality I'd suggest to take a step back and
think what you actually want to do ... usually there is a better
solution.

johannes