Shorthand PHP IF statement without the else notation

Posted On Oct 21, 2008 at 9:13 pm
7 Comments

PHP In an earlier post I explained how to do Ternary shorthand if/else statements in PHP. One of the major benefits of using a shorthand if/else statement is that you can use it inline with a string. But what if you only need to do in inline if statement, without the else?

Most people would just do the standard shorthand notation and make the else return a blank string like this:

$string = "The car is ".($carDead==true?"NOT":"")." working.";

If you're kind of anal about how your code looks, you might not like doing this because it's redundant and makes the code less readable (not by much, but still). Doing a quick search on Google, I found that many people have asked if theres a way to do a shorthand if without the else. The straight answer is no, PHP does not offer such notation. However, I have a solution.

PHP allows you to execute functions inline with a string and the returned value of that function will be inserted into the string. We can use this to create a pseudo inline if statement. Here is the function:

function iif($statment,$returnTrue=true,$returnFalse=false) { if($statement) return $returnTrue; else return $returnFalse; }

Now you can load the function iif anytime you need to do an inline if statement without an else (but it also has the built in ability for a specified false return as well by including a third parameter)

$string = "The car is ".iif($carDead==true,"NOT")." working";

This code will not execute as quickly as a straight if/else statment, but I'm sure the performance difference is so minimal that it would not make a significant difference unless you were processing thousands of inline statements using this function.

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