First I was excited to see how your solution works.

After some tries, I realized that “compact” is of complete no use here…

You have to enter the variable name as a string parameter… to finally get this variable name…

a simple
function varName($theVarName) { return $theVarName; }
does the same.

Problem is to enter the variable itself as a parameter to get its name.

function varName($theVar) {
$variableName = key($theVar);
$variableValue = $theVar[$variableName];
echo (’The name of the variable used in the function call was ‘.$variableName.”);
echo (’The value of the variable used in the function call was ‘.$variableValue.”);
}
$myVar = ‘abc’;
varName(compact(’myVar’));

Though I don’t recommend creating a reference to a nameless variable, `function varName(&$theVar)` works too.

Since compact() takes the variable name as a string rather than the actual variable, iterating over a list of variable names should be easy.

As to why you would want to do this — don’t ask me but it seems like a lot of people ask the question so here’s my solution.

$a = 10;
$b =&$a;

var_name($b, get_defined_vars()); // a instead of a.