Question

I am trying to create a visual representation of a user rating from 1 to 5 (including .5 values) in the form of stars and half-stars. I have already created the array of user ratings from the MySQL database, I have averaged those values to create an average user rating in the form of a number. What I would like to do is take this value..

$averageuserrating

And if that value is “1”, then return this code once

 echo '<img src="images/star.png" class="ratingstar" />';

If $averageuserrating is 1.5, then this code will be returned

<img src="images/star.png" class="ratingstar" /><img src="images/halfstar.png" class="ratingstar" />

And so on… Is there a way to do this without 10 nested if statements?

Answer 1

It can be done by something like this:

$fullStar = '<img src="images/star.png" class="ratingstar" />';
$halfStar = '<img src="images/halfstar.png" class="ratingstar" />';

$rating = 1.5;

while($rating > 0){
    if($rating >= 1){
        echo $fullStar;
        $rating = $rating - 1;
        continue;
    }

    if($rating >= 0.5){
        echo $halfStar;
        $rating = $rating - 0.5;
    }
}

On a side note, this is not the best way to display a rating system.