Question

If I have an array that looks like this:

$str = '';
if( $_POST['first'] )
    $str = $_POST['first'];
if( $_POST['second'] )
    $str .= ($str != '' ? ',' : '') . $_POST['second'];
if( $_POST['third'] )
    $str .= ($str != '' ? ',' : '') . $_POST['third'];
if( $_POST['fourth'] )
    $str .= ($str != '' ? ',' : '') . $_POST['second'];
$str .= ($str != '' ? '.' : '');

Which gives me something like this:

Joe, Adam, Mike.

However, I would like to add an “and” before the last item.

So it would then read:

Joe, Adam, and Mike.

How can I modify my code to do this?

Answer 1

Arrays are awesome for this:

$str = array();
foreach (array('first','second','third','fourth') as $k) {
    if (isset($_POST[$k]) && $_POST[$k]) {
        $str[] = $_POST[$k];
    }
}
$last = array_pop($str);
echo implode(", ", $str) . " and " . $last;

You should probably special case the above for when there’s one item. I, in fact, wrote a function called “conjunction” which does the above, and includes the special case:

function conjunction($x, $c="or")
{
    if (count($x) <= 1) {
        return implode("", $x);
    }
    $ll = array_pop($x);
    return implode(", ", $x) . " $c $ll";
}

Nice question!

Updated: General purpose way to do this:

function and_form_fields($fields)
{
     $str = array();
     foreach ($fields as $k) {
         if (array_key_exists($k, $_POST) && $v = trim($_POST[$k])) {
              $str[] = $v;
         }
     }
     return conjunction($str, "and");
}

...

and_form_fields(array("Name_1","Name_2",...));

I added correct $_POST checking to avoid notices, and blank values.