Question

I read the other day that assigning values within if statements isn’t such a great idea.
To be honest i actually use this quite a lot e.g.

if(isset($_POST) && $post = $_POST) {
  print_r($post)
}

Any idea why that isn’t optimal?

Answer 1

Not least because it’s a common newbie mistake to forget that assignment and equality operators are different, so it can easily lead to confusion or difficult-to-detect bugs.

Readability of your code is more important than any micro-optimisations