$GLOBALS array for WordPress

4 comments

1. I’m not sure if all of these are WordPress globals, but I did a quick grep type search of the WordPress files and tried to extract all the globals I could..

   This is the list I compiled. It may not be perfect, but should *hopefully* represent a lot of the $GLOBALS keys that WordPress uses It won’t account for globalised variables that aren’t explicitly defined as $GLOBAL, but still have global scope.

   $GLOBALS['_menu_item_sort_prop']
   $GLOBALS['_wp_sidebars_widgets']
   $GLOBALS['blog_id']
   $GLOBALS['body_id']
   $GLOBALS['comment']
   $GLOBALS['comment_depth']
   $GLOBALS['content_width']
   $GLOBALS['current_site']
   $GLOBALS['current_user']
   $GLOBALS['custom_background']
   $GLOBALS['custom_image_header']
   $GLOBALS['debug_bar']
   $GLOBALS['editor_styles']
   $GLOBALS['is_winIE']
   $GLOBALS['link']
   $GLOBALS['login_grace_period']
   $GLOBALS['month']
   $GLOBALS['month_abbrev']
   $GLOBALS['more']
   $GLOBALS['post']
   $GLOBALS['post_type']
   $GLOBALS['posts']
   $GLOBALS['query_string']
   $GLOBALS['request']
   $GLOBALS['single']
   $GLOBALS['submenu']
   $GLOBALS['tab']
   $GLOBALS['type']
   $GLOBALS['weekday']
   $GLOBALS['weekday_abbrev']
   $GLOBALS['weekday_initial']
   $GLOBALS['wp_admin_bar']
   $GLOBALS['wp_filter']
   $GLOBALS['wp_object_cache']
   $GLOBALS['wp_post_types']
   $GLOBALS['wp_query']
   $GLOBALS['wp_styles']
   $GLOBALS['wp_taxonomies']
   $GLOBALS['wp_the_query']
   $GLOBALS['wp_version']
   

   If you wanted to get a better idea of everything inside the global array you could run something like the following to get a print out, because the above approach was obviously flawed since globals are defined in more than one way.

   add_action( 'shutdown', 'print_them_globals' );
   
   function print_them_globals() {
   
       ksort( $GLOBALS );
       echo '<ol>';
       echo '<li>'. implode( '</li><li>', array_keys( $GLOBALS ) ) . '</li>';
       echo '</ol>';
   }
   

   That should give you a more comprehensive list of variables in the global scope.

   Hope that’s helpful. 🙂

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2. Unfortunately, no.

   Globals definitions are scattered throught the codebase.

   There’s no documentation for most of them, either.

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3. $GLOBALS is an associative array containing references to all variables which are currently defined in the global scope. This is a PHP language tool.

   Global variables can be defined simply by creating a new item in the $GLOBALS array like this:

   $GLOBALS['foo'] = 'foo content';
   

   WordPress Globals are used to share data across files. They are not defined in any specific place but you can find some of the most important ones here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Global_Variables

   PHP makes it even easier to use $GLOBALS by allowing you to access the items by simply declaring it using the global keyword.

   global $foo;
   $foo = 'foo new content';
   

   is the same as:

   $GLOBALS['foo'] = 'foo new content';
   

   Please note, if you didn’t define $foo as global, it will not be linked to the global variable scope.

   Some further reading on this:
   http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.globals.php

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4. If you try to print out all the $GLOBALS and get an error ‘allowed memory exceeded’ or something like that, than put this code inside functions.php:

   if(!function_exists("print_all_globals")){
       function print_all_globals() {
          $test = array_keys($GLOBALS);
          echo "<pre style='background:blue;color:white;'>";
          print_r($test);
          echo "</pre>";
          exit;
       }
       add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts','print_all_globals');
   }
   

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