Breaking out of a... not a loop.

delayedinsanity · 04-22-2008, 05:07 PM

Is there any way, say if you were using curly braces to organize your code into blocks, ie;

PHP Code:


			
function somecall() {

$var = "somevar";



    {

     if ($then) { do(); }

     while (!$crashed) { crash(); }

    }



}

can you break out of those blocks like you can break out of a loop? Dependent of course on something evaluating to true, say halfway through the block there's an if statement that checks a value and if it's true, I don't want to process the rest of the block.

This is for purely aesthetic reasons at this point, I'm trying to create a block of if statements that will look more like a switch statement than a spaghetti mess of if's and else if's.

PHP Code:


			
{

  if (empty($value)) { dothis(); break; }

  if (!ctype_alpha($value)) { dothis(); break; }

  if (strcasecmp($value, $othervalue)) { dothis(); break; }

}

-m

Salathe · 04-22-2008, 06:22 PM

Within a function you can return at any point.

PHP Code:


			
function check($value)

{

  if (empty($value)) { dothis(); return; }

  if (!ctype_alpha($value)) { dothis(); return; }

  if (strcasecmp($value, $othervalue)) { dothis(); return; }

}

As for otherwise, what's the harm in using elseif to string your checks together? In other words, why is this (bearing in mind, it's not syntactically correct PHP):

PHP Code:


			
{

  if (empty($value)) { dothis(); break; }

  if (!ctype_alpha($value)) { dothis(); break; }

  if (strcasecmp($value, $othervalue)) { dothis(); break; }

}

any prettier than:

PHP Code:


			
if     (empty($value))                   dothis();

elseif (!ctype_alpha($value))            dothat();

elseif (strcasecmp($value, $othervalue)) dothose();

If you absolutely insist in using break then you'll need to use some form of looping structure (to loop once) out of which you can break (note: not pretty!) :

PHP Code:


			
$foo = 'car';

do {

    if ($foo === 'aar') { echo 'aar'; break; }

    if ($foo === 'bar') { echo 'bar'; break; }

    if ($foo === 'car') { echo 'car'; break; }

    if ($foo === 'dar') { echo 'dar'; break; }

    echo 'ear';

} while (0);

delayedinsanity · 04-22-2008, 06:30 PM

Yeah, in retrospect I jumped the gun asking that question. I know break wasn't going to work, I had already tested that one. I had a huge block of else if's and I was just looking at different ways of writing it so that I could still read it later on. Turns out using curly braces to block out each specific group and using comments to label them made it easily readable on its own.

I just think too much, and usually not about useful stuff. Thanks anyways. :)
-m