Question

I have lists where strings correspond with values. For example, in a company list I could have Microsoft correspond with the letters MS.

Obviously, this could be transposed as a table in MySQL to make the list extensible but, from curiosity, how would you express this in constant form in PHP ?

P.S: There is the class-with-constants approach (see accepted answer here: PHP and Enumerations) to act as an enumeration but would that really be of any use seeing that enumerations map to integer values ?

Answer 1

How about using define

define("MS","Microsoft");
echo MS;

This would echo Microsoft.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.define.php

Also the link you gave to a possible solution could just as easily be used with strings instead. The only reason it acts as an enum from other languages is because you define the values from 0 to n, instead of doing that just use string instead.

class Companies {
    const MS  = 'Microsoft';
    const IBM = 'International Business Machines';
}

echo Companies::MS;

I think this would work.