I came across an interesting quirk in PHP today. The way a nested ternary operator is evaluated in PHP is unlike that of any other language I’ve come across: left to right.
Ex:
<?php
$test = 'one';
echo $test == 'one' ? 'one' : $test == 'two' ? 'two' : 'three';
?>
What do you suppose that prints? Wrong, the answer is ‘two’. Let’s break this down in how it is working, shall we.
<?php
$test = 'one';
echo $test == 'one' ? 'one' : $test == 'two' ? 'two' : 'three';
?>
Here, I’ve emphasized the first ternary operation. What PHP will do is evaluate this section and return a value, in this case it is the string ‘one’. The boolean value of the string ‘one’ is true. So, for the second ternary operation, ‘two’ gets selected.
No other language I know of acts like this.
Hopes this help someone one day.
