Comments on: Using PHP’s alternate syntaxes

By: Stanton

Stanton — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:25:26 +0000

@Andrew Pryde

Perhaps you’re right about the ternary operator reducing readability, although I feel that for small evaluations which may be inline with PHP, It’s great

@Dan Brown

Thanks for taking the time to reply I deliberately kept the example code simple but you’re right, there should be a step in there which protects against an undefined variable throwing a warning. One thing I love (and hate, sometimes) is that there’s a thousand ways you can do things in PHP, I’d probably do this:

1	$comments = (isset($count) && $count == 1) ? 'comment' : 'comments';

Of course this then poses the question of “If $count isn’t set, you wouldn’t want to echo ‘comments’ at all, and we start making the example too verbose to explain the initial meaning… but I know what you mean

By: Dan Brown

Dan Brown — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:36:47 +0000

I prefer to do this -

1
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$comments = ‘comments’;
if ($count = 1) {
$comments = ‘comment’;
}
echo $count . ‘ ‘ . $comments;

- than use the ternary operator. It also means the variable is always set to a known value (preferably the safest of he options) rather than undefined if the setting code doesn’t get run due to some logic error.

By: Andrew Pryde

Andrew Pryde — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:35:50 +0000

Many argue that omitting brackets and using the ternary operator reduces readability. I agree with you when you have embedded blocks of HTML but I think the ternary operator reduces readability. My ten cents anyway, @Prydie