Question

Suppose I have a conditional statement without brackets in a function:

function get_user_id() 
{
    if ($something) $this->some_function($str);
    return array('user_id' => $user_id);
}

I think bracketless statements are bad practice… I want to add brackets to the if-statement but where does the statement end? Does is it end at the first semicolon or the end of the function?

Which is correct:

function get_user_id() 
{
    if ($something)
    {
       $this->some_function($str);
    }
    return array('user_id' => $user_id);
}

or..

function get_user_id() 
{
   if ($something)
   {
      $this->some_function($str);
      return array('user_id' => $user_id);
   }           
}

Answer 1

The first version is correct, as without braces, only one statement after the if statement applies to the conditions of the if statement.

So this:

if ($something) $this->some_function($str);

Is equivalent to:

if ($something) {
    $this->some_function($str);
}

I do agree that the manual is a bit vague about this, but its example is about a single statement, and mentions that in order to incorporate additional lines to the same conditional, you would need a “statement group”, denoted by curly braces:

Often you’d want to have more than one statement to be executed
conditionally. Instead, you can group several statements into a
statement group.