Question

I have conditionals like this:

if (foo == 'fgfg' || foo == 'asdf' || foo == 'adsfasdf') {
// do stuff

}

Surely there’s a faster way to write this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would keep the conditionals the way they are. Any clever way of shortening them would make the code less idiomatic and less readable.

Now, if you do care about readability, you could define a function to do the comparison:

if( foo_satisfies_condition(foo) ) {
  // ...
}

Or:

if( is_month_name(foo) {
  // ...
}

If you give the function a name that faithfully describes what it does, it will be easier to understand the intent of the code.

How you implement that function would depend on how many comparisons you need. If you have a really large number of strings you’re comparing against, you could use a hash. The implementation details are irrelevant when reading the calling code, though.