Question about multiple "if" conditions

[masonbarge]

This has bothered me for a long time. I'm hoping it's a really dumb question.

When you have a string of conditions in an 'if' clause and one side of the conditional expression is the same in each condition, is there any shortcut to avoid writing out every expression in full. E.g. instead of

PHP: Select all

if(($name!='Bob')&&($name!='Sally')&&($name!='Hermione')) { 

is there some way to write

PHP: Select all

if($name!=('Sally'||'Bob'||'Hermione')) { 

I feel like there must be, but my experiments have failed, as has Google. Hopefully this is just a question of getting the various brackets and operators in right order.

[grahame]

The short answer is "no - you must write it all out if you're using the != operator". In Perl 6 (different language) you WILL have a shortened syntax for this sort of thing but that's highly unusual.

In php you could write
if (!ereg ('^(Sally|Bob|Hermione)$,$name)) { ....
although that would be slighly less efficient at run time.

I do worry about hardcoding data such as people's names into a program. When Hermione decides she now wants to be called "Squirrel", or when Chloe joins the team, you're back to the code! Your code would be more maintainable if you had an array of names in a separate file. You could compromise with something like:

$people = array("Hermione","Bob","Sally");
if (in_array($name,$people)) { ...

[masonbarge]

Thanks so much Graham. When someone writes a PHP book and thinks to include all the little things that you can and can't do (e.g. I am amazed at all the unnecessary concatenation when people echo/print variables, especially in queries) . . .

The people's names were just for illustration (I'm really worried about $_POST variables at the moment) but the idea of putting the values in an array is actually a workaround for the original question and makes for a nice module or class method.

I need to look up a few techniques re: user-defined functions, but I think I actually will do a little module of some flavor. Maybe I'll get ambitious and do a class for $PHPSELF forms.

If I do, I'll post it here for your amusement.