March 23, 2012
Why is this PHP comparison failing?
Question by Paul
I’m trying to compare a defined code against a set of blocked country codes. In the following example the country code is getting caught in my if block:
$country_code = 'US';
if ($country_code == ("NG" || "RO" || "VN" || "GH" || "SN" || "TN" || "IN" || "ID" || "KE" || "CN" || "CI" || "ZA" || "DZ" || "RU")) {
print "COUNTRY CODE: $country_code<br>";
}
I see this for my results”
COUNTRY CODE: US
I wouldn’t expect ‘US’ to get caught…what am I missing?
Answer by Brad
What you are doing is OR-ing strings together. Since non-empty strings converted to boolean values are true, this evaluates to the following:
$country_code == true
Since $country_code is also a non-empty string, that also evaluates to true:
true == true
Thus, you get TRUE.
To solve your problem, you need to do what Pekka suggests:
if (in_array($country_code, array('NG', 'RO', etc.)))
See also:
Answer by Starx
This would be a lot simpler if done this way.
$codes = array("NG", "RO", "VN");
$search = array_search("NG");
if($search) {
echo $codes[$search];
}
