Question

I’m trying to compare a defined code against a set of blocked country codes. In the following example the country code is getting caught in my if block:

$country_code = 'US';

if ($country_code == ("NG" || "RO" || "VN" || "GH" || "SN" || "TN" || "IN" || "ID" || "KE" || "CN" || "CI" || "ZA" || "DZ" || "RU")) {
    print "COUNTRY CODE: $country_code<br>";
}

I see this for my results”

COUNTRY CODE: US

I wouldn’t expect ‘US’ to get caught…what am I missing?

Answer 1

What you are doing is OR-ing strings together. Since non-empty strings converted to boolean values are true, this evaluates to the following:

$country_code == true

Since $country_code is also a non-empty string, that also evaluates to true:

true == true

Thus, you get TRUE.

To solve your problem, you need to do what Pekka suggests:

if (in_array($country_code, array('NG', 'RO', etc.)))

See also:

• http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.boolean.php
• http://php.net/manual/en/function.in-array.php