Question

I have an issue here, and I’m looking for experienced programmers to tell me which is the preferred solution.

I have values being returned that are surrounded in quotes. "TOTAL" and "VALUE" being two examples. These should not be confused with TOTAL and VALUE — the string is actually surrounded by double quotes.

What I noticed is that the switch statement below doesn’t work because it’s looking for TOTAL not "TOTAL":

switch ($statTypeName) {
    case "TOTAL":
        echo "<br>TOTAL";
        break;
    case "VALUE":
        echo "<br>VALUE";
        break;
}

To get this working, I had to put a single quote around the case — '"TOTAL"'.
In my text editor (Notepad++), it is difficult to see the single quote around the double quotes.

I know this isn’t a common issue, but what would be the “professional” way of solving this? The way I did it, or should I be extracting the string from the quoted string and do away with the double quotes altogether..?

Thanks!

Answer 1

What you’re running into is indeed common, and you can go about it a couple different ways. There’s nothing wrong with the way you’re doing it, or @KyleBanks solution (escaping the double quotes). Given php provides single and double quote string definitions, I prefer the first. But its up to your preference, or your dev team.

As far as extracting the substring within the string quotes.. it depends on what they’re there for in the first place.