Passing variables between functions

Ok, Cleary im missing something obvious here but I cant see it, PHP aint my strong point. I’ve created a plugin that accepts values when the user inputs them into a widget, I need those values to be put into one function from another.

So basically what im asking is how do yo go about passing variables between functions?

Simplified it looks a bit like this.

function get_variable($variable){

$example = new example_class(array
(
	'example' => array('test',$variable,'test'), 

));

}

function execute_variable(){

$variable = 'test';
}