Posted by Steve on 11/01/06 18:26

| I'm going to need to polish that hallo for you ;-) You've come to the
| rescue once again. This one was driving me nuts! I tried all sorts of
| search patterns for how to not display null data with a number_format, but
| couldn't find anything. And when I tried myself with if statement, I just
| kept getting the same result, i.e entire data for that id being removed.
I
| actually woke up in the middle of the night last night with a "I wonder if
| this will work" scenario, and then couldn't go back to sleep until I got
up
| and tried it. ;-)

i've had nights like that too. we are all still learning...or at least
should be: whether it be the language itself or how to effectively apply it
to ever increasingly difficult problems.

| Ok now that you've shown me how to do it, could you translate what's
| happening for me, if you don't mind that is? I think I know what's going
| on, but not entirely sure, ;-) and don't wont to show the world my lack of
| knowledge in case I'm wrong by posting what I think. lol... vanity and
all
| that!

perhaps this will provide you with a "v-8" moment...

if ($this)
{
// do this
}

you simply were telling php that "do this" included not only properly
formatting your price, but also outputting your html as well. you just
needed "do this" to only properly format your price and NOT you html as
well. notice the difference:

$price = '';
if ($price)
{
$price = number_format(123.456, 2);
echo '<pre>' . $price . '</pre>';
}

versus:

$price = '';
if ($price)
{
$price = number_format(123.456, 2);
}
echo '<pre>' . $price . '</pre>';

the example i gave is called a ternary operation (operator). it's similar to
a single-line if/else statement that returns a value to a variable. i used
it to save space and make sure that the code reader/editer/reviewer/you
would understand that the condition was only applied to price and NOT the
html output. the second example will suffice as well since neither a '' or a
0 price needs to be formatted.

do the above examples make sense?

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