Newbie here with some questions about code items.

[mittra]

I am a self-taught programmer and my knowledge of PHP is rudimentary at best. I'm pretty good at Frankensteining existing code to make it do the things I want, but sometimes, I just get totally stuck. I am really excited to have found this forum and hope to expand my knowledge and understanding of php so that I can become a better and more efficient programmer.

I have a project I am currently working on that I really could use some assistance with and I'm hoping to find some answers here.

In the project I'm working on now, I see a lot of $this-> and I am not really sure how that works or what it means.

Also, in a lot of the if statements there are additional conditional statements I haven't figured out like these:

if(!$this->ht['max_fetch'] || !is_numeric($this->ht['max_fetch']))

if(($mailboxes=$this->getMailboxes()) && in_array(trim($folder), $mailboxes))

and then there's this return statement:

return $str?$str:imap_utf8($text);

I'm pretty sure that the || indicates AND and the ! indicates NOT. Does the && indicate OR? And WTF is going on in that return statement?

I'm going to do some searches of the forum and see if I can't get my big project questions answered and figure out where to post the questions, but wanted to introduce myself and get some answers to a few questions that have been really bugging me because I couldn't otherwise find good definitive answers for them.

Thanks!

[Derokorian]

|| indicates OR
&& indicates AND
See more here http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.logical.php

In the return, they are using a ternary operator (more here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.comparison.php#language.operators.comparison.ternary) which is much like an if statement. The boolean check is before the ?, between the ? and : is what to use if the boolean check is true, and after : is to use when boolean check is false. That same statement could be rewritten as:

if( $str ) {
   return $str;
} else {
   return imap_utf8($text);
}

[NogDog]

ternary operator == a way to make it look like your code is more efficient and to save a few keystrokes, while making it harder to maintain later (even for yourself). 🙂

[NogDog]

Also, $this is only used within a class definition, and it indicates the current instantiation (object) of that class. It is used, along with the -> operator, to give you access to any methods/properties within that object.

[mittra]

Thanks for the rapid response guys. It helps a lot.

I've already posted one other thread about my project in the Zend area, but I think I'm going to head over to the Coding section and start trying to get my project figured out on a larger scale. 🙂