Is there any sort of assign-if-not-empty-otherwise-assign-null function in PHP?
I’m looking for a cleaner alternative to the following:
$variable = (!empty($item)) ? $item : NULL;
It would also be handy if I could specify the default value; for instance, sometimes I’d like ‘ ‘ instead of NULL.
I could write my own function, but is there a native solution?
Thanks!
EDIT: It should be noted that I’m trying to avoid a notice for undefined values.
Re edit: unfortunately, both generate notices on undefined variables. You could counter that with @, I guess.
In PHP 5.3 you can do this:
$variable = $item ?: NULL;
Or you can do this (as meagar says):
$variable = $item ? $item : NULL;
Otherwise no, there isn’t any other way.
Answer：
Update
PHP 7 adds a new feature to handle this.
The null coalescing operator (??) has been added as syntactic sugar
for the common case of needing to use a ternary in conjunction with
isset(). It returns its first operand if it exists and is not NULL;
otherwise it returns its second operand.
<?php
// Fetches the value of $_GET['user'] and returns 'nobody'
// if it does not exist.
$username = $_GET['user'] ?? 'nobody';
// This is equivalent to:
$username = isset($_GET['user']) ? $_GET['user'] : 'nobody';
// Coalescing can be chained: this will return the first
// defined value out of $_GET['user'], $_POST['user'], and
// 'nobody'.
$username = $_GET['user'] ?? $_POST['user'] ?? 'nobody';
?>
Original Answer
I ended up just creating a function to solve the problem:
public function assignIfNotEmpty(&$item, $default)
{
return (!empty($item)) ? $item : $default;
}
Note that $item is passed by reference to the function.
Usage example:
$variable = assignIfNotEmpty($item, $default);
Answer：
Well yes, there is a native solution for assigning the value or NULL when the variable was unset:
$variable = $possibly_unset_var;
If you just want to suppress the notice (which doesn’t solve anything or makes the code cleaner), there is also a native syntax for that.
$variable = @$unset_var;
Answer：
I wouldn’t recommend this on a production system, but:
<?php
//$value=1;
[email protected]$value ?:null;
var_dump($item); // NULL
?>
<?php
$value=1;
[email protected]$value ?:null;
var_dump($item); // 1
?>
Tags: phpphp
