my first function

scuzzo84

I cant stand how to do breaklines in php , some reason also "\n" doesnt work anyways I got tired of doing

print "<br>";

so I made a little function, not sure if its a good idea or good but it works and with 2 days of php I am kinda proud of myself.

dont make fun of me :queasy:

 
<?php

function space($num){
$num = abs($num);
$pop = 1;
while ($num != $pop) {
print "<br>";
$pop += 1;
}
}
print "First line";
space(-5);
print "2nd line";

?>

rincewind456

"\n"

puts new lines in you HTML code, they are not visible on the rendered page.

scuzzo84

rincewind456 wrote:
"\n"
puts new lines in you HTML code, they are not visible on the rendered page.

are you saying that these should be on seperate lines when outputted?

 
<?php
print "hi\n";
print "there";
?>

Shrike

It's good to see you've got the hang of the basics in such a short while. One little niggle is this line

while ($num != $pop) {

If I call space( 0 ); will the function loop indefinitely? It might be more sensible to write

while ($num <= $pop ) {

Then the function will return without doing anything if $num is greater than $pop.

There is also an even shorter way of writing $pop += 1 which is ++$pop. As you might guess you can also say --$pop.

bubblenut

I'd say a good next step in your learning would be to get the hang of using the php manual. It can be a little finicky at times and it's often difficult to find what you're looking for but the more you use it the easier it gets (and it's a hell of a lot better than many other API docs out there). In this case there is a php function which could be very usefull called [man]str_repeat[/man]

function space( $num ) {
  $num = abs($num);
  print(str_repeat("<br />", $num));
}

benkillin

You're doing good.

I wanted to clarify what the other person stated earlier: ++$varName; will work to increment a variable, but unless I need to do something special, personally, I use $varName++;

It seems more logical when I'm reading code.