Question

Possible Duplicate:
In PHP given a month string such as “November” how can I return 11 without using a 12 part switch statement?

I have weekdays in a specific format that I need to convert to another format and ultimately translate them, as well. I need to do this at runtime, meaning I cannot change the format in which the dates are stored, but have to convert them for the final output on the website.

Now, of course I could just create seven if-statements to do this, like

if ($wkday == "Mon") { $wkday = "Monday"; }
if ($wkday == "Tue") { $wkday = "Tuesday"; }

…

But I’m trying to find a neater way to do this, like putting both input and output values in arrays and comparing them to one another, to cut down the number of ugly if-statements. It’s not so bad in this case, seeing that there are only seven possible values, but I’d like to do it right and learn for the future. 🙂 I tried to search for this, but don’t even know what terminology to use. I’ll be grateful for any hint.

Thanks for you help!

Answer 1

An array would be useful here, and in this case it would be similar to a hashmap in Java.

$wkday = "Thu";
$wkdayMapper = array(
  "Mon" => "Monday",
  "Tue" => "Tuesday",
  "Wed" => "Wednesday",
  "Thu" => "Thursday",
  "Fri" => "Friday",
  "Sat" => "Saturday",
  "Sun" => "Sunday"
);

echo $wkdayMapper[$wkday]; //Thursday

PHP manual link on arrays