Do I need to release each variables to re-use them?

[Wolfiesaxah]

Hi Guys, just a simple confirmation, I have a script that starts with a "while" loop and inside that while-loop there's tons of actions/scripts and tons of variables declared as "Local". My question is when the first round of while-loop script is done, do I need to release each variables before looping? I'm asking because there's a lot of variables inside that loop. These variables will be re-used in each loop.

 

while 1

 Local $VariableaA = "This is the first variable"

 Local $VariableaB = "This is the 2nd variable"

;More stuffs here

VariableaA = 0        ;<----DO I STILL NEED TO RELEASE EACH VARIABLES OR THE "Local" RE-DECLARATION AT THE START OF THIS LOOP AUTOMATICALLY DOES THAT? OR I GUESS THE ASSIGNING OF NEW VALUES KINDA RE-USES THEM.

VariableaB = 0

WEnd

[water]

Have you tested what the values of the variables are after the first loop?

[water]

A test as simple as this would show you how AutoIt works:

Local $Test = "Test"
ConsoleWrite($Test & @CRLF)
Local $Test = "Test2"
ConsoleWrite($Test & @CRLF)
Local $Test
ConsoleWrite($Test & @CRLF)

 

[Wolfiesaxah]

Awesome! I didn't know Autoit has ConsoleWrite

[water]

But the first place to look at is the help file:

Declaring a variable with a simple value in the same scope will not change the value in the variable.

[water]

Awesome! I didn't know Autoit has ConsoleWrite

​Then you should have a look at the AutoIt tutorials in the wiki or the help file to get a better understanding of how AutoIt works

[jchd]

It's also better for variables used in loops to be declared once before the loop. The Local qualifier doesn't limit them to the loop block: their scope is local to the function they are in, or the whole script when they are not declared inside a function, starting from the point of declaration. There is no other scoping construct like { ... } in C, for instance, like it or not.

That also means that if you assign a significantly large value to a variable (like FileRead a very large text file or create a huge array) its content will persist outside of a loop and it's up to you to free the memory used by re-assigning 0 to it (re-assigning to an empty string will not free memory used by a string variable).