In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer wants to introduce you to his new best friend in the wonderful world of PHP - the create_function function.

His name is 'create_function' and he's a really useful co-worker. For those of you who just vaguely know him - don't worry, he's not so much like his ev(a|i)l cousin. Well, that doesn't mean he can't be harmful, but he's more likely to help you instead.

To show why he's such a good friend, Felix includes some example code to help solve a fictional problem of a manager wanting to filter down the information about a few perspective programmers. The create_function function gives the code the ability to run various bits of code (like a call to in_array or counting the values in an array).