Question

for example, in PHP code like this:

if($this->function1() && $this->function2())
{
  //everything is alright
}
else
{
  //function1 or function2 returned false
  //whodunnit?
}

Is there a language construct or something that can help me find out the culprit in the else block? I don’t want to have to run the conditions once again, just to find out what went wrong.

Please bear with my pseudo-code. My actual code will look totally out-of-context here… and I’m using CodeIgniter, by the way.

Answer 1

I want to use the name of the function that caused the error.

This is somewhat ugly. I wouldn’t use it (= “for this purpose”).
Also I’m making this CW to eschew the downvotes.

 if ($this->function1($failed="func1") && $this->function2(.., $failed="func2")) {
    ...
 }
 else {
    print $failed;

This syntactic workaround necessitates that you can fill up the methods parameters with the required number and pass the fake $failed parameter in an unused spot. It in fact just adds this variable to the local variable scope.

You could redesign this if-statement more clumsily with more && ands and () parens to the same effect. This is just somewhat compacter. Yet I’m not sure if I understand why you would want a string with the failed function name, not just a boolean, or what’s up with the ifphobia.