Delving deeper into the PHP lake…testing if a variable exists in a list

As a PHP developer of almost four years now, I often still come across little problems in coding that make me do the good ol Google search to find the answer. (someday I will have memorised the entire PHP manual, but today is not that day ;-).

Anyway today I was asked about how to do a IN LIST type comparison in PHP. (similar to the mysql IN statement).

A few google searches later revealed that there exists no such PHP command, however the in_array function can be used to perform the task:

$myArray = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

if (in_array($var, $myArray)){
// do some code.
}

I guess one could also combine the two as follows:

if (in_array($var, array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5))){
// do some code.
}

I’ll have to test that one, but you get the idea…