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if> <Type Operators
Last updated: Fri, 10 Oct 2008

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Control Structures

Table of Contents

Introduction

Any PHP script is built out of a series of statements. A statement can be an assignment, a function call, a loop, a conditional statement or even a statement that does nothing (an empty statement). Statements usually end with a semicolon. In addition, statements can be grouped into a statement-group by encapsulating a group of statements with curly braces. A statement-group is a statement by itself as well. The various statement types are described in this chapter.



if> <Type Operators
Last updated: Fri, 10 Oct 2008
 
add a note add a note User Contributed Notes
Control Structures
wintermute
29-Aug-2007 03:45
Sinured: You can do the same thing with logical OR; if the first test is true, the second will never be executed.

<?PHP
if (empty($user_id) || in_array($user_id, $banned_list))
{
exit();
}
?>
Sinured
01-Aug-2007 02:59
As mentioned below, PHP stops evaluating expressions as soon as the result is clear. So a nice shortcut for if-statements is logical AND -- if the left expression is false, then the right expression can’t possibly change the result anymore, so it’s not executed.

<?php
/* defines MYAPP_DIR if not already defined */
if (!defined('MYAPP_DIR')) {
   
define('MYAPP_DIR', dirname(getcwd()));
}

/* the same */
!defined('MYAPP_DIR') && define('MYAPP_DIR', dirname(getcwd()));
?>
dougnoel
05-May-2006 09:29
Further response to Niels:

It's not laziness, it's optimization.  It saves CPUs cycles.  However, it's good to know, as it allows you to optimize your code when writing.  For example, when determining if someone has permissions to delete an object, you can do something like the following:

if ($is_admin && $has_delete_permissions)

If only an admin can have those permissions, there's no need to check for the permissions if the user is not an admin.
niels dot laukens at tijd dot com
26-Dec-2004 12:49
For the people that know C: php is lazy when evaluating expressions. That is, as soon as it knows the outcome, it'll stop processing.

<?php
if ( FALSE && some_function() )
    echo
"something";
// some_function() will not be called, since php knows that it will never have to execute the if-block
?>

This comes in nice in situations like this:
<?php
if ( file_exists($filename) && filemtime($filename) > time() )
   
do_something();
// filemtime will never give an file-not-found-error, since php will stop parsing as soon as file_exists returns FALSE
?>

if> <Type Operators
Last updated: Fri, 10 Oct 2008
 
 
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