John's hacks
From ProgClub
I decided I might start documenting some hacks I've come across in my travels which I think are neat.
Removing last comma
Sometimes you're processing a list to build a string and you want a comma after all items except the last one. You can do that like this:
// 2020-04-14 jj5 - it's important to handle this case... // if ( count( $list ) === 0 ) { return 'list is empty'; } $result = 'my list: '; $is_first = true; foreach ( $list as $item ) { if ( $is_first ) { $is_first = false; } else { $result .= ', '; } $result .= $item; }
But that can be simplified like this:
// 2020-04-14 jj5 - it's important to handle this case... // if ( count( $list ) === 0 ) { return 'list is empty'; } $result = 'my list: '; foreach ( $list as $item ) { $result .= "$item, "; } // 2020-04-14 jj5 - the neat hack is dropping the last two characters here... // return substr( $result, 0, -2 ) . '.';
Although the whole thing can often be simplified as something like this (you might also need to check for an empty list):
return 'my list: ' . implode( ', ', $list ) . '.';