PHP Developer

As a PHP developer of almost four years now, I often still come across little problems in coding that make me do the good ol Google search to find the answer. (someday I will have memorised the entire PHP manual, but today is not that day .

Anyway today I was asked about how to do a IN LIST type comparison in PHP. (similar to the mysql IN statement).

A few google searches later revealed that there exists no such PHP command, however the in_array function can be used to perform the task:

$myArray = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

if (in_array($var, $myArray)){
// do some code.
}

I guess one could also combine the two as follows:

if (in_array($var, array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5))){
// do some code.
}

I’ll have to test that one, but you get the idea…

Whenever I have to output a numbered list of data I usually run the following code to achieve the required result.

$counter = 0;
// for loop that does all the required code
$counter++;
// end for

but I have discovered a lovely little function that does all this for me.

function increment(&$counter){
$counter++;
return $counter
}

now I simply call

increment($whichever_counter)

and it automatically outputs the next numeric.

Great! Simple and easy to use…..that’s the way to code.