if and while statements

ukndoit

I am trying to modify my helpdesk, which was built in PHP.

In it there are a bunch of if and while statements that look like this....

  if( mysql_num_rows( $res ) == 1 )
    echo "<option value=\"0\">Global</option>\n";
  else
    while( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $res ) )
    {

Who does PHP not break with a { after the ) of the closing if statement? How does it know how far to go?
Is this just a bad design, or does PHP handle stuff like that?

Thanks.
Richard

TheDefender

That code should look more like:

if( mysql_num_rows( $res ) == 1 ) {
    echo "<option value=\"0\">Global</option>\n"; 
} else {
    while( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $res ) ) {
        // WHILE LOOP CODE HERE
    }
}

IF( mysql_num_rows( $res ) == 1 ): 
    echo "<option value=\"0\">Global</option>\n"; 
ELSE: 
    WHILE( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $res ) ) :
      // WHILE LOOP CODE HERE
    ENDWHILE;
ENDIF;

But without seeing the entire code, we couldn't really tell you if the code (as a whole) is good or bad.

ukndoit

Thanks, I figured it should have those brackets....

One more thing I noticed...
in the regular HTML you can put <? code ?>

For instance in this script I'm using they have this inside the regular html:

<?= $LANG[field_subject] ?>

Can I put that inside of an echo as it is? or would I just put $LANG[field_subject] or an = in front of just that?

thank you much!!
Richard

TheDefender

That is a shortened PHP tag...

Basically, that is the same as:

<?PHP
echo $LANG[fieldsubject];
?>

Does that make sense?

ukndoit

I think it does... If I have this:

<?
echo ("Hello world, Goodbye World");
?>

Can I do this:

<?
echo ("Hello World, " . <?= $LANG[goodbye];?> . " World");
?>

Or would the <? ?> tags inside the echo not work since I am already inside a <? tag?

Thanks!
Richard

TheDefender

No,

This:

<? 
echo ("Hello World, " . <?= $LANG[goodbye];?> . " World"); 
?>

Would look like this:

<? 
echo "Hello World, " . $LANG[goodbye]. " World"; 
?>

ukndoit

Got it. Thank you!!!

TheDefender

No problem... Be sure to mark this thread resolved. (Link is at the bottom)

diego25

About the if-while question from before, you don't always need curly brackets. If what's inside the if statement (or loop) is only one statement (or one block) then you can omit the curly brackets. When you start having more than one, that's when you need the curly brackets.

You can try this code for example:

<?
$i = 0;
if (1) 
	while ($i < 5) {
		print($i);
		$i++;
	}
else
	print "false";

?>

Diego

TheDefender

Thumbing through php manual... (hear my pages flipping?) LOL

I stand corrected. I guess, I believe in the whole "Do it the same every time philsophy" It just makes things easier to code and troubleshoot. I guess I never felt the need to look deeper into that one...