Tag Archives: if-else

Alternative way of writing an if-else statement in php.

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In PHP, there are a couple ways of writing an if-else statement. One is:

if($variable == 'something'){
	$result =  'the variable equals something';
}else{
	$result =  'the variable does not equal something';
}
echo $result

Another way of writing the above if-else statement is:

if ($variable == 'something') :
	$result =  'the variable equals something';
else:
	$result =  'the variable does not equal something';
endif;
echo $result

I used the first of the above syntax for a long time (the second I never really cared for).. but couple months ago, I started paying more attention to a completely different if-else statement syntax, used particularly for assigning values to a single variable based on the met conditions in the if-else statement. Here’s the example:

	$result = $variable == 'something' ? 'the variable equals something' : 'the variable does not equal something';
	echo $result;

What I like about this alternative way of writing an if-else statement is not only less code, but cleaner code as well.

You can also nest the if-else statements like this:

    $result = $test1 ? $test2 ? 'test1 true and test2 true' : 'test1 true and test2 false' : 'test1 false';
    echo $result;