Posted by Jim Michaels on 03/21/06 06:00

This is a simple coding tip I learned to prevent comparisons from becoming
assignments (and this becoming a hair-pulling session during debugging):

in comparisons, try to put your constants on the left hand side of the
operator and variables on the right hand side.
example
if (3==$x) {
//do something
}



if ($x=3) {
//do something
}
if this were intended as a comparison, it would never be flagged as an error
by the interpreter or compiler (in PHP's case, interpreter).
With this line, I missed an = and the interpreter won't complain. it simply
assigns 3 to $x and does something every time. With the top line, you can
fix your code quickly because of the error message generated if you miss an
=.
Consider it a good coding habit? Then again there are books on this (if
they are still published).

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