Question

I am trying to write a bunch of nested if statements that are somewhat as follows:

if (strcmp($data['reports'][$i][$j],$data['reports'][$i][$j-1])){

but as you all know, you have to write a separate if statement if it is 0, because 0-1 doesn’t exist.

    if ($j == 0){
 //First report, to prevent OBOB
        echo "<br/><a href = ".$filename.">".$data['reports'][$i][$j]."</a>";

#-> You would have to write two more statements here to test for province...
}

    if ($j >= 1){
 //All subsequent reports
      if (strcmp($data['reports'][$i][$j],$data['reports'][$i][$j-1])){
        echo "<br/><a href = ".$filename.">".$data['reports'][$i][$j]."</a>";
#-> You would have to write two more statements here to test for province...
    }

Now, imagine if you have to test other dependent values for sequential identicality?

It goes from 4 to 8 to 16 separate statements to just test for 4 of these…

So, I just had the idea to stuff crap into $j = -1.

        $data['reports'][$i][-1]='aaaaaaaaaa'; 
// This would depend on the type of data you are
// comparing I suppose it could be zeros.
        $data['provinces'][$i][-1]='aaaaaaaaa';

Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

Why don’t you just start your loop with 1 instead of 0? That is, instead of this:

for ($j = 0; $j < count($data['reports'][$i]); $j++ )

do this:

for ($j = 1; $j < count($data['reports'][$i]); $j++ )

It’s pointless to compare the first array element to the previous one anyway, so just skip it.