Interesting glitch....

bpat1434

Okay, so I'm developing a simple calendar script (just to show days and highlight the current one)... so I created a class to create the calendar and I've got an interesting glitch....

function showMonth($return=FALSE, $mon="date('m')", $yr="date('Y')"){

What I want to happen is have the default values for $mon and $yr be the current month & year returned by the server. So I tried this:

function showMonth($return=FALSE, $mon=date('m'), $yr=date('Y')){

But I keep getting the parse error unexpected "(" expecting ")"... Well that's because of the date() function. So the work-around was encapsulating it in double quotes. Well, the month works, but the year keeps evaluating to 1999. So I checked my computer date (just to be sure) and it says 2005. I just echo date('Y') and I get 2005.

Is this a php glitch or is there a better way to declare the default values as being the current month (number) and year?

~Brett

Weedpacket

It was mooted to have non-static initialisers as default values, but it was deemed that That Way Madness Lay. What I generally do is use a totally bogus value for the default and check that. Doubly good if even the type is invalid, and checking with ===.

null is a good choice when null would be a "totally bogus value" to pass:

function showMonth($return=FALSE, $mon=null, $yr=null){ 
if($mon===null) $mon = date('m');
if($yr===null) $yr = date('Y');

As a bonus you can have (and this is a pretty artificial example):

$months = array(1, 2, null, 6);
foreach($months as $month)
  showMonth($return, $month);

And get months shown for (at the time of writing) January, February, December, and June. In short, you can treat "default behaviour" as just another value you can pass.