Question

I’m currently organising my site by forcing everything through index.php using .htaccess. Then I’m including some logic that uses the $REQUEST_URI to display the relevant template (see the code). My problem is that I find it annoying to have to check the the request array value is set every single time, eg if (isset($request[1])&&$request[1]=="projects"){...

Is there a way that I can just write if ($request[1]=="projects"){...

The above line, throws an error if $request[1] is not set, ie on the home page.

Here’s my complete code. It shows an individual project on mydomain.com/projects/house,
and it shows a list of projects on mydomain.com/projects

$request = explode("/", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

if (isset($request[1])&&$request[1]=="projects"){

    require("./controller/projects.php");

    if (isset($request[2])){
        include("./view/project.html");
    } else {
        include("./view/project-list.html");
}

Answer 1

Make a function!

function current_controller() {
    if(isset($request[1])
        return $request[1];
}

if(current_controller() === "projects") { ... }

Or you can do

function is_current_controller($controller) {
    if(isset($request[1])&&$request[1] === $controller)
        return true;
    return false;
}

if(is_current_controller("projects") { ... }