Question

Something that really would like to know but never found out are shortcuts in PHP.

I am currently coding a function with a foreach loop with just a single statement inside. I tried to omit the curly braces as you can do in if/else control structures and it works. No errors.

foreach($var as $value)
    $arr[] = $value;

Now I tried to use it the same way but putting an if/else block inside it. Again, working and no errors.

foreach($var as $value)
    if(1 + 1 == 2) {
        $arr[] = $value;
    };

Then, I thought like “why is this working?” and omitted the closing semicolon. Still working. So I tried to use the if/else statement without curly braces inside the foreach loop and again, still working and no errors. But is the foreach loop really closed/ended right now?

foreach($var as $value)
    if(1 + 1 == 2)
        $arr[] = $value;

At least I omitted the closing semicolon again and (as expected) a parsing error occurred.

So my big question is: When can I omit the curly braces and in which structure/loop/function? I know that I can definitely do so in if and else. But what about while, for and foreach?

And yes, I know that it is not safe, smart, whatever to code without curly braces and there are shorthands like $condition ? true : false; and if: doSomething(); endif;, endfor; and endforeach;. I don’t wanna learn about shorthands I just want to understand the conditions about when and where it is possible to omit the curly brackets.

Answer 1

When you omit the braces it will only treat the next statement as body of the condition.

if ($x) echo 'foo';

is the same as

if ($x) { echo 'foo'; }

but remember that

if ($x)
  echo 'foo';
  echo 'bar';

will always print "bar"

Internally it’s the other way around: if will only look at the next expression, but PHP treats everything in {} as a single "grouped" expression.

Same for the other control statements (foreach, and so on)