PHP

[DOSGuy]

I'm primarily a Pascal/Delphi programmer, and sometimes I'm not able to find the PHP equivalents to programming techniques that I'm used to.

I'm PHPizing the code for convenience (this isn't how you would actually code it in Delphi). In Delphi I could make a statement like:

Code: Select all

if ($animal IN ['cat', 'dog', 'mouse'])

to avoid having to type

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if (($animal == 'cat') OR ($animal == 'dog') OR ($animal == 'mouse'))

or

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if ($number IN [1,2,5,7..10])

to avoid having to type

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if (($number <= 2) OR ($number == 5) OR ($number >= 7))

Is there a PHP equivalent of Delphi's powerful "IN" statement? I can't just type

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if ($animal == 'cat' OR 'dog' OR 'mouse')

because it will always return TRUE. I'd prefer not to use a switch case statement in this situation.

[Qbix]

http://nl.php.net/manual/en/function.in-array.php

[DOSGuy]

I had a feeling that it was going to be a matter of searching an array. That's still not quite as convenient as 'IN' because I have to waste time defining an array, but I guess this is how it has to be done in PHP. Thank you very much, Qbix.

[Qbix]

well I am no PHP expert, but this is how I did it in one of my things.

[deathshadow]

My advice is to use switch/case -- which will actually run fastest of them too. This is true in Pascal as well -- string sets are slow! (numerics aren't much better!).

switch ($animal) {
case 'cat':
case 'dog':
case 'mouse':
// do whatever it is yer doing here
}

case conditions fall through to each-other, so the above is the same as doing a bunch of ||

Oh, and in PHP don't use OR, it's logic is not what you think it is, stick to || -- trust me on this. The first time you hit up against "false or true = false, false || true = true" you'll be ripping your hair out... OR doesn't work like it does in pascal, as it will short circuit eval the first false.

You can also pass arrays as constants since PHP is an untyped language...

if (in_array($animal,['cat','dog','mouse'])) {

Would work too... though dog slow.

Not to bump a three year old post -- just bored