Discussion on: Code Smell 154 - Too Many Variables

There are various things missing or not working in your code example. It doesn’t change the meaning you’re trying to convey, of course, but it makes it look like you rushed and didn’t pay attention to details.

Parameter is string imageUrls (it’s missing the dollar sign) but you iterate over it so it should be an array, not a string.

throw new \Exception('We could'nt find image');

Syntax error: either escape the apostrophe or surround the message with double quotes.

I know it’s not the scope of your post but you could have passed $imageNames as param to avoid referencing a variable outside of the function scope.

$imageName = $imageNames[$index];

Talking about too many variables you can just return a Boolean here:

list($found, $images, $imageFilename) = $this->tryToFindFile($localFileSha1, $imageFilename, $images, $imageName);

Something like:

// method probably doesn’t need all 4 parameters
if (!$this->fileExists($localFileSha1, $imageFilename, $images, $imageName)) {
    // throw exception
}

I like the idea of showcasing code smells but it would look better with working code IMHO.