Question

Ok what I would like to do is somewhat unique, and I can’t find anything online to guide me, so hopefully I do a good job explaining it.

PROBLEM:

I have a series of if statements in PHP. To simplify, each if statement looks like this:

if($product_name == 'shoe') {
     $shoe_description = '<p>Shoe description</p>';
     echo $shoe_description;
}
else if($product_name == 'car') {
     $car_description = '<p>Car description</p>';
     echo $car_description;
}
else if($product_name == 'bottle') {
     $bottle_description = '<p>Bottle description</p>';
     echo $bottle_description;
}

This works fine as long as $product_name is defined as one of my variables. What I would like to do is, as the last statement, say that “if product_name matches none of my variables, show a random description from above“; so I’ll add a final else statement to the end of the above code (example – not working code):

else {
     // Show one of the echo strings from above (i.e. $car_description)
     //but pick randomly
}

QUESTION:

What code would I need to edit/add so that the final else statement picks one of the 3 description variables so that I can then echo it on the page?

Answer 1

This is a pretty basic rewrite of the logic you gave. You can usually rewrite a series of if statements into simpler logic, or into a switch statement—depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. In this case, I’d check if the $product_name has a description and otherwise just pick a random key.

$product_name = $_SESSION['product_name'];

$descriptions = array(
    'shoe' => '<p>Shoe description</p>',
    'car' => '<p>Car description</p>',
    'bottle' => '<p>Bottle description</p>',
);

if(isset($product_name) && isset($descriptions[$product_name])) {
    echo $descriptions[$product_name];
} else {
    echo $descriptions[array_rand($descriptions)];
}