Debugging and Performance - One Equal, Two Equals, Three Equals

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How often did you write the following code?

if ($a = 5) 
{
print "a is 5";
}

If you're like most programmers, the answer is an unfortunate "often." The problem here is caused by the fact that the if statement allows for any operations to take place inside its condition—including assignments. Thus, the preceding line is not technically incorrect, but it's obviously not what the author intended to perform, as it will always be evaluated to true, making the if statement pointless and, what's worse, changing the value of $a.

Clearly, the statement should have been written as follows:

if ($a == 5
{
print "a is 5";
} 

In this case, the condition is a comparison operator, and it will be evaluated as true only if the value of $a is 5.

There is, luckily, a very easy way to avoid this mistake once and for all, without any possibility of ever slipping again: make sure that the condition is written in such a way that it cannot possibly be misinterpreted:

if (5 == $a) 
{
print "a is 5";
}

With this approach, if you mistakenly only use one equal sign instead of two, as in 5 = $a, the interpreter will print out an error because you can't assign anything to an immediate value. If you make a habit of writing all your conditions this way, you will never fall in the assignment trap again!

There's Equal and Equal

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, PHP is a loosely typed language. This means that, under the right circumstances, it will automatically juggle data types to perform its operations according to how programmers are most likely to want it to.

There are scenarios, however, in which this is not a desirable approach, and you want, instead, PHP to be strict and literal in the way it compares data. Consider, for example, what would happen if you were dealing with information coming from a patient's medical record. In this situation, you'll want to make sure that nothing is left to chance and that PHP doesn't attempt to interpret user input in too liberal a way.

Generally speaking, it's always a good idea to use the identity operators (=== and !==) whenever you know that a value has to be of a certain type:

if ($a !== 0) {
echo '$a is not an integer zero';
}

Next: Testing for Resource Allocation >>
 

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