Question

For readability and perfomance reasons, I’d like to build up an array with a switch statement instead of if-statements.

Consider the following if-statement:

$size = 2;
$array = array();
if($size >= 1) { array_push($array,'one','foo'); }
if($size >= 2) { array_push($array,'two','bar','barista'); }
if($size >= 3) { array_push($array,'three','zoo','fool','cool','moo'); }

It basically counts up from 1 to $size, it might be more readable and most likely a lot faster with a switch-statment…but how do you construct that ??

$step = 2;
$array = array();
switch($step)
{
    case ($step>1): array_push($array,'one','foo');
    case ($step>2): array_push($array,'two','bar','barista');
    case ($step>3): array_push($array,'three','zoo','fool','cool','moo');
}

I tried leaving out the break, which didn’t work – as the manual says:

In a switch statement, the condition is evaluated only once[…].
PHP continues to execute the statements until the end of the switch
block, or the first time it sees a break statement.

Anyway, anyone got an idea how to build up such an array with a switch-statement ??

Answer 1

Surely what you want can be achieved much more easily using

$array=range(1,$size);

Based on further coments and subsequent edits, something like:

$baseArray = $array(array('one'),
                    array('two','twoA'),
                    array('three','threeA','threeB'),
                    array(),
                    array('five'),
                   );
$step=2;
$array = array_slice($baseArray,0,$step);

and then flatten $array