Question

Let me explain this further, So I tend to do something like:

$foo = "";
$bar = "This is not empty"

if($foo){
  $str = $foo;
}else{
  $str = $bar;
}

magic($str)

I thought this is a really nasty way to approach this and there got to be some easy syntax to achieve this and i’m just being dumb.

So i tried:

magic($foo OR $bar)

Unfortunately that actually compares the two variables and returns 1 instead of the actual true variable itself.

Basically i want a syntax that checks if the first variable is empty then it’ll return the second one instead.

Answer 1

Yes, in PHP 5.3 or later, use the new version of the ternary operator:

$str = $foo ?: $bar;

If you need to support PHP 5.2 or earlier you’ll have to use the slightly more verbose

$str = $foo ? $foo : $bar;

See http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.comparison.php

Note neither these or your if($foo){ $str = $foo; } else{ $str = $bar; } check the value of $bar, your question title doesn’t quite match the body.

If you have multiple items and you want to remove the empty ones you can use array_filter, eg:

array_filter(array($foo, $bar, $baz));