Question

I’ve spent hours trying to get my code to work, its a rats nest of if/elses. Basically I want to check a country name against these two arrays:

//if its in this array add a 'THE'     $keywords = array('bahamas','island','kingdom','republic','maldives','netherlands',                   'isle of man','ivory','philippines','seychelles','usa');     //if its in this array, take THE off!     $exceptions = array('eire','hispaniola'); 

and thats it.

Its sending me batty, and to be honest I’m embarassed to show you my code. Lets just say it has 2 if statements, 2 else statements and 2 foreach loops. Its a blooming mess, and I was hoping someone can dumbfound me by showing me a good way of doing this? I expect there is a way using only 1 line of code, or something sickening like that. Thank you.

Answer 1

This builds on @sgehrig’s answer, but note the change in your exceptions:

//if its in this array add a 'THE'     $keywords = array('bahamas','island','kingdom','republic','maldives','netherlands',                   'isle of man','ivory','philippines','seychelles','usa'); //if its in this array, take THE off! $exceptions = array('the eire','the hispaniola');  $countryKey = strtolower($country); if (in_array($countryKey, $keywords)) {     $country = 'The ' . $country; } else if (in_array($countryKey, $exceptions)) {     $country = substr($country, 4); }