David and Katherine Goodwin

ifsetor

While reading a Linux Magazine the other day, I saw a summary of changes which are perhaps going into PHP v6. One of these was a function called ifsetor. Namely :

//Old :
$name = "";
if(isset($_POST['name'])) {
    $name = $_POST['name'];
}

Is replaced with a single call of :

$name = ifsetor($_POST['name'], "");

Which seems syntatically much nicer :), so my version is :

function ifsetor(&$param, $or) {
        if(isset($param)) {
                return $param;
        }
        return $or;
}

Of course, while writing this I did a quick Google and found this .

I also thought that perhaps the function could/should go one step further and also apply a regexp on the variable, which could be used to sanitise input, so perhaps :

function ifsetorre(&$param, $or, $re = false) {
    if(isset($param)) {
        if($re === false) {
             return $param;
        }
        if(preg_match($re, $param)) {
            return $param;
        }
    }
    return $or;
}
// fail if '$bar' contains lower case letters.
$foo = ifsetorre($bar, "default", "/^[^a-z]+$/");

Is a better approach; where it performs a regexp match on the input as well - this would at least provide a simple (one line) validation check as well.

My thoughts are partly prompted by the Zend Framework InputFilter which I think is a good idea (and I definately like it's unsetting of $_POST) but perhaps not sufficient - no length checking, or matching for weird characters.

Are regexp too hard for most people to use?

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