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W. Jason Gilmore

"Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional"


CHAPTER 3 ?–  PHP BASICS 101
The switch Statement
You can think of the switch statement as a variant of the if-else combination, often
used when you need to compare a variable against a large number of values:
switch($category) {
case "news":
echo "

What's happening around the world

";
break;
case "weather":
echo "

Your weekly forecast

";
break;
case "sports":
echo "

Latest sports highlights

";
break;
default:
echo "

Welcome to my Web site

";
}
?>
Note the presence of the break statement at the conclusion of each case block. If a
break statement isn??™t present, all subsequent case blocks will execute until a break statement
is located. As an illustration of this behavior, let??™s assume that the break statements
are removed from the preceding example and that $category is set to weather. You??™d get
the following results:
Your weekly forecast
Latest sports highlights
Welcome to my Web site
Looping Statements
Although varied approaches exist, looping statements are a fixture in every widespread
programming language. This isn??™t a surprise because looping mechanisms offer a
simple means for accomplishing a commonplace task in programming: repeating a
sequence of instructions until a specific condition is satisfied. PHP offers several such
102 CHAPTER 3 ?–  PHP B ASICS
mechanisms, none of which should come as a surprise if you??™re familiar with other
programming languages.


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