«
»

Multiple cases for switch construct

Looking at the PHP documentation, it is not clear how to add multiple values for the same case in a switch construct. It seems that you should be able to do

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. case ("whatever" || "something"):
  2. //Do something;
  3. break;

But, you can't. I tried, and it didn't work. Fortunately, after much searching, I found a way to do it; and it's not near as difficult as I was making it.

Let's look at this code:

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. switch (value)
  2.     {
  3.     case 1:
  4.         echo "Value was 1";
  5.         break;
  6.     case 2:
  7.     case 3:
  8.         echo "Value was 2 or 3";
  9.         break;
  10.     case 4: 
  11.         echo "Value was 4";
  12.         break;
  13.     default:   
  14.         echo "Value was not 1-4";
  15.         break;
  16.     }

It works. If the value is either 2 or 3 it echoes out the same string. This takes advantage of not putting in the break; statement after the case 2: line.

The next step is to allow a range, and I'm still looking for that... If you have any thoughts, stick it in a comment :-)

Bookmark and Share

Post Info

Posted Tuesday, December 28th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
Tags

3 Responses to “Multiple cases for switch construct”

  1. I’ve discovered the syntax which makes the multiple-construct work:

    You simply omit the parenthesis, so that the case line reads eg:

    case 1 || 2:
    echo “foobar”;

    and so on.

    It seems that the range allows something like this:

    case 1-3:
    echo “foobar”;

  2. The OR construct seems to work for me, but the range doesn’t.

  3. After working around with the same question, I think I give some kind of explanations, a little different from the provious ones.

    switch doesn’t act differently with strings.

    This work fine:

    case “A”:
    case “B”:
    case “C”:
    case “D”:
    $L = “ABCD”;
    break;

    case “E”:
    case “F”:
    case “G”:
    case “H”:
    $L = “EFGH”;
    break;

Leave a Reply