{PHP} Concatenating immediate if's

corblimey

Came across a strange issue today that took me far too long to debug. I had a line like this:

echo "hello " . ($p_gender=="f")?"Mrs ":"Mr " . "Doyle";

The code just wouldn't execute, no errors or anything just a blank space where I was expecting my output. I finally recoded it as

echo "hello ";
echo ($p_gender=="f")?"Mrs ":"Mr ";
echo "Doyle"

which just seems wasteful to me Is this a known issue? Is there a better way of writing the first piece of code to work?

phil

Fix:

echo "hello " . (($p_gender == "f") ? "Mrs " : "Mr ") . "Doyle";

Always group operations and operators with parantheses, if for no other reason than code readability. However, the next best reason is what you've found out - introducing unintended bugs.

Operator evaluation and precedence can sometimes be non-obvious. Make it obvious by grouping.

FYI, the '?:' operator is called the ternary operator.

corblimey

phil wrote: »

Fix:

echo "hello " . (($p_gender == "f") ? "Mrs " : "Mr ") . "Doyle";

Always group operations and operators with parantheses, if for no other reason than code readability. However, the next best reason is what you've found out - introducing unintended bugs.

Operator evaluation and precedence can sometimes be non-obvious. Make it obvious by grouping.

FYI, the '?:' operator is called the ternary operator.

Thanks, phil. Very helpful (on both counts)