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In most cases, we'll wanna do more than just echo a value inside of our functions.

In order to do that, we'll need to have the function return a value.

This way, we're able to store data from a function call,

to any type of value variable.

Those can include arrays, integers, Booleans, so on and so forth.

A return statement will also end the function's execution immediately.

This way, we can pass control back to the line that the function was called from.

Allowing us to return at different locations inside our function.

Although a function cannot return multiple values, it can however return an array,

containing the multiple values inside of a single data type.

Let's jump over to workspaces, and work with the return statement.

>> So as we were talking about earlier,

we're gonna wanna do more than just echo values inside of our functions.

We're gonna wanna return values.

So there is a keyword in PHP called return,

that we can use inside of our functions.

There're a lot of great uses of return,

more than just returning the value of whatever we want.

So, let's create a couple of small functions to just sort of

see what we can do.

So to get started, let's create a very simple function called Hello,

just like before.

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Okay?

And then open and

close our curly braces to give ourselves function boundaries there.

And then inside, we're going to return a value.

All right, so let's return the same kind of string we would before,

like Hello World.

Now the way we're gonna do that, instead of saying echo, we'll say return.

All right? And then we'll say return, and

then do our typical string here.

Hello World.

All right? Close it with a semicolon, and now when we

call the function, when we run just Hello, it won't really do us any good.

We need to store this somewhere.

So the output of this needs to do something.

So we'll store it to a variable called Greeting.

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Greeting is equal to the output or

the return value on line four of the function Hello.

So, we'll go down here now, and if we save this and

run our preview, let's see what it does.

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Okay? You'll see we actually have no output.

The reason why, is we're not echoing.

We're just returning.

But if we say echo and then greeting, all right?

And then hit Save, go back over and refresh.

Now it'll say hello world.

It's actually outputting that variable, which the variable is just a string, but

the string was generated by our function, which you can see on line seven.

Okay, let's do a little bit more with this.

So instead of just saying hello, we're gonna pass on an argument here.

We're gonna say name.

All right.

And then, we're gonna do a couple of, of tests in here.

So we'll say if and then open and close, name.

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Okay?

Equals Mike, right?

Then what are we gonna do?

We will actually go here and

we'll return instead of Hello World, we'll say Hello Mike.

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All right? Make sure we do our curly braces here.

All right, all our tabs are good.

So that will be pretty good as long as it's equal to Mike.

Else we wanna do something different.

Otherwise, so we'll say else

we'll just say return not echo, hello stranger.

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Doesn't need to be caps.

All right. Close our single quotes and

then a semicolon.

And so now, when we pass through name and say it's Mike.

We should get still an echoed greeting.

So let's go back over, hit Refresh, except we're gonna get, Hello Mike.

Now if we were to change it to something else.

So Chris, hit Save, head back over and

then hit Refresh, now it says, hello stranger.

Okay, so you can see here we're returning a value here, in a conditional.

Just the same way we were before.

So we can have multiple return values, but

we cannot return more than one value from a single function.

So it only has one return clause.

So once it runs the return, it exits the function.

Let's say we wanna do something with an integer calculation.

So what we'll do is we'll say sum and

then we'll do A and B as our two variables.

Actually that's not against sum 'cuz that is an internal word.

We'll say add up.

Let's say that's our function.

Okay, so now, I'm gonna get rid of this, and

then we're going to say our value is equal to add up.

And we are going to add up two numbers.

So the first argument would be two, the second argument would

be the integer four, and then we will echo our value.

All right.

So that won't do anything cuz we haven't returned anything.

So we need to do a return.

[UNKNOWN] Return and then we'll do $A, plus $B.

Close it with a semi colon, and then go look at our preview.

Six.

Exactly what we were looking for.

Okay, so that's a way we can return integer values, we can return strings.

If we need to return multiple values, we can.

But we need to do it with an array.

So let's say we wanna actually return the two values that came in,

as well as the summed value.

So, the way we'll do that, is we're gonna create an internal array,

we'll just call it ARR.

And we will set it equal to let's see, the first value would be,

let's see, array, go down, keep it tidy.

All right, so the first value is going to be $a, okay.

The next one would be $b, which gives us our two input values, and

then finally we'd need our summed value, which would be A plus B.

So we can just simply say A plus $B.

Okay, so we have three different values here in our array.

The first one is $A.

The second one is $b.

And the third one would be $a plus $b.

And then to return instead of returning a plus b, we'll just simply return ARR.

Now, if I was to just echo this value, let's see what we get back.

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Okay, we get a string array.

Well, we can use an internal function of PHP, which we'll get into a little bit

more on internal functions, but we have one that's called print R.

So I'll just say instead of echo, print R, and then pass through the value.

That way we'll actually get to see the keys and values of the array.

And back over to our preview and hit Refresh.

So here you can see that key zero for the array is the two, which is our A.

Key one would be four, and then our output value, or key two, would be six.

So if we wanted to, we wanted to instead of print up just the whole array,

we would just say echo, and then value.

And then the final key, right?

Which would be two.

All right, so we'll semi-colon there, end our statement, and then refresh.

So now we can get back our value, but

we also have the a and the b as well, if we needed to use it.