Hi all,

Here is a little tip that I wish someone had told me when I started out with PHP

As I'm sure you all know, when comparing two values you would commonly use something like:

However, if you are anything like me, you will occasionally type a single equals sign instead of double:

Which introduces an anoying little hard-to-find bug in your code as instead of comparing the 2 values, it is actually setting $myVar to 'hello'!

Unfortunately, PHP sees this as perfectly valid so you don't get any error messages and aren't aware of any problems until it causes a bug in your application.

However, there is a little trick you can use to prevent this problem. When comparing values, use:

As you can see, we have reversed the variables. This is still a perfectly valid if() statement but if you accidently type a single equals sign instead of two equals signs:

PHP will throw you a nice error letting you know of the problem:

Once you get in to the habbit of writing your comparisons this way it will save you countless hours of debugging anoying little bugs (well, it has for me anyway )

Alan