Question

On a website I have a number of small PHP scripts to automate changes to the text of the site, depending on a figure that’s calculated from a MySQL database. The site is for a fundraising group, and the text in question on the home page gives the total amount raised.

The amount raised is pulled from the database and rounded to the nearest thousand. This is the PHP I use to round the figure and find the last three digits of the total:

$query4 = mysql_query(“SELECT SUM(amountraised) AS full_total FROM fundraisingtotal;”);
$result4 = mysql_fetch_array($query4);
$fulltotal = $result4[“full_total”];
$num = $fulltotal + 30000;
$ftotalr = round($num,-3);
$roundnum = round($num);
$string = $roundnum;
$length = strlen($string);
$characters = 3;
$start = $length – $characters;
$string = substr($string , $start ,$characters);
$figure = $string;

(£30,000 is the amount that had been raised by the previous fundraising team from when the project first started, which is why I’ve added 30000 to $fulltotal for the $num variable)

Currently the text reads:
the bookstall and other fundraising events have raised more than &pound;<? echo number_format($ftotalr); ?>

I’ve just realised though that because the PHP is rounding to the nearest thousand, if the total’s for example £39,200 and it’s rounded to £40,000, to say it’s more than £40,000 is incorrect, and in that case I’d need it to say ‘almost £40,000’ or something similar. I obviously need to replace the ‘more than’ with a variable.

Obviously I need to test whether the last three digits of the total are nearer to 0 or 1000, so that if the total was for example £39,2000, the text would read ‘just over’, if it was between £39,250 and £39,400 something like ‘over’, between £39,400 and £39,700 something like ‘well over’, and between £39,700 and £39,999, ‘almost.’

I’ve managed to get the last three digits of the total as a variable, and I think I need some sort of an if/else/elseif code block (not sure if that would be the right approach, or whether to use case/break), and obviously I’m going to have to check whether the figure meets each of the criteria, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Could anyone suggest what would be the best way to do this please?

Answer 1

Instead of nested if else blocks, you could have a function that takes in the dollar amount and inside the function throw the variable in a switch case statement and at a particular case return the correct echo‘d text.

Switch cases provide readability over several if else statements. If you need coIde examples, let me know.

Update:

Performing comparisons on integers only, switch case is the best bet. When comparing conditions that result in a boolean value, using if else is what you need.

I had took your code and switched the case to be if else and here is what it looks like with an example output:

function qualifier($figure) {
        if ($figure < 249) return "just over";
        elseif ($figure < 399) return "over";
        elseif ($figure < 699) return "well over";
        elseif ($figure < 999) return "almost"; 
        else return "No number entered";
     }
     
echo "We are " . qualifier(250) . " our goal!";
// outputs: "We are over our goal!"