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Using PHP OR for Params

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I'm sure this is old news to everyone, but I just figured it out. In PHP, you can use the or keyword in other places besides before die(). I'm starting to use this in conjunction with the "at sign" operator to quickly "param" variables. I'm sure I'll come up with more interesting uses later...

Before:

if ( ! isSet($a) ) {
	$a = 1;
}

Using an Inline IF. It's shorter, but not there yet...

$a = ( isSet($a) ) ? $a : 1;

After:

$a = @$a or $a = 1;

It's the shortest of all! The @ is there to suppress PHP's error when $a is not set.

Note: you have to use "or", you can't say:

$a = @$a || $a = 1;

It doesn't work the same way.

This is especially critial for big nerds like me who tweak their local development environtment to crank out every single PHP error or warning. (What do you mean you don't code like this? You like PHP ignoring non-declared variables?! I don't! But then again I come from ColdFusion which bitches over every non-declared variable, hence the CFPARAM tag...)

You could even use this idea in a loop if you wanted to get away from for ($i=0, $i < something.... etc.

do {
	$a = @$a+=1 or $a = 1;
	echo "\$a:  $a\n";
} while ($a < 5);

Sadly, PHP is not like Ruby, and you can't say:

$a = @$a or 1;  # i'm sure in ruby it's simpler

But anyway... Maybe this could be used to shorten PHP Fusebox's handling of the set verb in parsed files...

May 18, 2006

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