In Ruby, Splat arguments are arguments preceded by a *, which signals to Ruby: "Hey Ruby, I don't know how many arguments there are about to be, but it could be more than one."

For example: 
def what_up(greeting, *bros)
  bros.each { |bro| puts "#{greeting}, #{bro}!" }
end
 
what_up("What up", "Justin", "Ben", "Kevin Sorbo")
It's will print out 3 greetings like the following:


 I also faced the similar one in  Python, which is called gather parameter . All arguments value will be collected into a tuple. To do this, you provide a final parameter definition of the form * args. The * indicates that this parameter variable is the place to capture the extra argument values. The variable, here called extras , will receive a sequence with all of the extra positional argument values.

For example:
def foo(*args):
    print args

foo(1,2,3,4,5)
foo (1,False,"String")

You can try the above script quickly in terminal :


In Php, I haven't found anything like Splat arguments in Ruby. If you want to implement something like "splat arguments" in Php, I think : func_get_args is a good choice. This function will get the list of function's arguments and return an array.

For example:
function foo()
{
    $arg_list = func_get_args();
    var_export($arg_list);
}
echo "<pre>";
foo(1,2,3,4,5,6);
echo "</pre>
You can see the result like that:
Reference:
  • http://www.codecademy.com/courses/ruby-beginner-en-ET4bU 
  • http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Think_Python/Tuples#Variable-length_argument_tuples
  • http://de.php.net/manual/en/function.func-get-args.php