Question

I find that I frequently end up writing a function that I always call ‘clamp()‘, that is kind of a combination of min() and max(). Is there a standard, ‘canonical’ name for this function?

It always looks something like this:

function clamp($val, $lower, $upper) {   if ($val < $lower)     return $lower;   else if ($val > $upper)     return $upper;   else     return $val; } 

Or simply using built-in min() and max() functions:

function clamp($val, $lower, $upper) {   return max($lower, min($upper, $val)); } 

Variations exist: You can also check for invalid input, where lower > upper, and either throw an exception or reverse the inputs. Or you can ignore order of the inputs and call it a median-of-three function, but that can be confusing.

Answer 1

clamp is a good name.

Let us make it the standard.