Question

I was just wondering if there is a shortcut to do something like this example :

if ( isset($_POST['name']) && $_POST['name'] == 'George' || $_POST['name'] == 'Mike' );

[EDIT] : Sorry if the question seemed ambiguous at first but what I meant to ask is “since I am doing all those checks on the same variable is there a better way not to write it three times?”

is there any easier way that is rare and ..

1. cleaner than nesting.
2. shorter than the syntax above?
3. in any of (Ruby, C#, or PHP) since I mainly use those 3 languages.

This is just a general knowledge question, I was just getting bored of writing nested ifs or long logical operations like the one above.

Answer 1

You could define a function for getting post data:

function getPOST($name) {
  return isset($_POST[$name]) ? $_POST[$name] : null;
}

The function will never show the notice about accessing a not existing array field and the result can be easily compared to the list of values in your example:

if (in_array(getPOST('name'), array('George', 'Mike')) {

}