Question

What I have right now is:

$somevar = ($progress_date != ('0000-00-00 00:00:00' || '//'))?$progress_date:'NA';

and it doesn’t ever spit out $progress_date. It defaults to always printing ‘NA’ instead.

Doing this and using fewer () to separate things

$somevar = ($progress_date != '0000-00-00 00:00:00' || '//')?$progress_date:'NA';

makes it so $progress_date always spits out, even when the date is set to a string of 0’s.

Is there a way using a ternary statement to catch both blank dates and dates set to 0 so that ‘NA” gets printed out?

Answer 1

Looks like what you actually want is a pair of conditions with &&.

$somevar = ($progress_date != '0000-00-00 00:00:00' && $progress_date != '//')?$progress_date:'NA';

You need to have two sides to each boolean comparison, so you cannot do :

// Won't do what you expect
$somevar = $progress_date != ('thing1' || 'thing2') ? : ;

Instead make the full comparison on both sides. Read out loud, it makes sense as what you need: Progress date is not equal to thing1 and progress date is also not equal to thing2

$somevar = $progress_date != "thing1" && $progress_date != "thing2" ? : ;