On Tim's blog today (Design by Tim), he has a new post that talks about "learning to extract()" - using this function to create variables based on $_GET and $_POST entries.

The days of explicitly declaring variables passed in from a form for use - or (gasp) using $_GET[’varName’] in your code is no longer needed! Clear as well as clean code is the discussion for variable setting today, and we get to explore how easy it is to extract(), Typically you would have call the variable and then set it.

The world is changing. While that is not bad for small forms or simple tasks but what if your project is larger or lets just say after reading this article you abondon gathering all the $_GET data from your simple form?

He goes on to talk about the different flags that you can pass in for various options (like "overwrite existing variable" or "prefix variable names with this" sorts of things). Of course, this kind of methodology has to be used carefully so as not to create more security issues than it's worth...