Question

Basically I need to create a string with $_GET['param'], something like:

$myString = $_GET['param'] . 'abc';

When $_GET['param'] isn’t isset i am perfectly fine with $myString being just ='abc'

• So I can do something like this:

  $myString = @$_GET['param'] . 'abc';
  

• Or use the standard way with isset:

  if (!isset($_GET['param']))
     $_GET['param'] = '';
  
  $myString = $_GET['param'] . 'abc';
  

In this case using the @ suppresser is considering such a bad pratice?

Answer 1

The most elegant thing IMHO would be to wrap that in a nice getter function, something like:

function _getParam($param, $default = '') {
    if (!isset($_GET[$param]))
       return $default;
    return $_GET[$param];

}


$myString = _getParam('param').'abc';

---

yes123 note:
As dvir said having a getter function for input variables in your framework can be handy. But this _getParam suffers of this problem:

Let’s see we make a typo in our code, we want to access $_GET['param'] and istead of it we type:

_getParam('parm')

Our code will work without generting any problems and we will have hard time finding the error.

So I thought we could modify the function presented to something like:

function _get() {
  $key = func_get_arg(0);

  if (func_num_args()==2) {
    if (!isset($_GET[$key]))
      return func_get_arg(1);  
  }

  return $_GET[$key];
}

This ensures that when we typo it with _get('parm') we will get a notice throwed normally. But when we use it with 2 param we get out default value:

_get('param','myDefaultValue');