Thanks for the explanation. I didn't use call by reference because when I've tried it before with other code, I always got a message that call by reference has been deprecated, with some php versions. So I don't use it now to avoid that problem. Is that not correct?

I used the $GLOBALS method since that is what it says to do in the php manual - http://us.php.net/unset

The function I posted was just for simplicity. The code involves more than that and it makes it easier to use a function in this case.