What's the best, preferred way of writing if shorthand one-liner such as:
expression ? $foo : $bar Plot twist: I need to echo $foo or echo $bar. Any crazy tricks? :)
5 Answers
10 Comments
Phil
The parentheses are redundant
Phil
I've never seen PHP fail to evaluate the conditional expression, no matter how complex, sans a pair of wrapping parentheses
Phil
Don't mind me, I'm just a stickler for unnecessary syntax (like using parentheses in ternaries and
include / require statements)
cHao
If you're in the habit of using
and and or in your conditions rather than && and ||, it can trip you up. But only because the wordy operators have different precedence.
pavitran
what can i do if I want to echo only when true and do nothing on false?
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echo (expression) ? $foo : $bar; 
Comments
The ternary operator evaluates to the value of the second expression if the first one evaluates to TRUE, and evaluates to the third expression if the first evaluates to FALSE. To echo one value or the other, just pass the ternary expression to the echo statement.
echo expression ? $foo : $bar; Read more about the ternary operator in the PHP manual for more details: http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.comparison.php#language.operators.comparison.ternary
Comments
Great answers above, and I love when programmers ask questions like this to create clear, concise and clinical coding practices. For anyone that might find this useful:
<?php // grabbing the value from a function, this is just an example $value = function_to_return_value(); // returns value || FALSE // the following structures an output if $value is not FALSE echo ( !$value ? '' : '<div>'. $value .'</div>' ); // the following will echo $value if exists, and nothing if not echo $value ?: ''; // OR (same thing as) echo ( $value ?: '' ); // or null coalesce operator echo $value ?? ''; // OR (same thing as) echo ( $value ?? '' ); ?> References:
Comments
// check if it value is true then display value otherwise it display empty or '' <?= $color ? $color : ''; ?> // same thing if condition is true then display Condition is true otherwise display Condition is false <?php echo $condition ? 'Condition is true' : 'Condition is false';?> 
echowould work in the branches. And the only reason you can get away with calling it the ternary anything is that there's currently only one ternary operator. "Ternary" meaning having to do with three, though...it's not a very helpful name. :)s/statement/operator. It just bothers me when I hear shorthand if