\n You know, the switch is a very useful and often times overlooked workhorse in php. I find myself using it a lot right now. I mainly use it to control a applications flow with session managment. The switch parses a session variable and based on what it is set as, navigates to a certain point in the application. Lets get right down to the dirty part! $myswitch = $_SESSION[‘form’];

switch ($myswitch){
    case 'show':
            show_form();       // if the form will not validate, it is resent
            break;
    case 'validate':       //is the form submited, then it is validated
            validate_form();
            break;        
    case 'process':       //is the form validated, then it is processed
            process_form();
            break;        
    default:
            show_form();     //if nothing has happened yet, we show the form
            break;        

}

The first line is very important. What if no session has been saved yet? If I call the switch on the session variable, it might not exist and throw an error. The rest is fairly straight forward. A switch is, in reality just a better organized set of if..else statements. I could also do something like this:

if ($a =="this){
    do_this();
}
if (a$ == "that") {
    do_that();
}
if (a$ == "nothing"){
    do_nothing();
}
    do_something();

Lets compare to:

$myswitch = $_SESSION['contest_form'];

switch ($myswitch){
    case 'this':
            do_this();
            break;
    case 'that':       
            do_that();
            break;        
    case 'nothing':       
            do_nothing();
            break;        
    default:
            do_something();
            break;        
}

You see the difference? Granted, my examples here are not to complicated, but it can get pretty hairy. The biggest reason to use a switch instead of a bunch of if statements is readability. One thing that I have learned is the best comments are really well formed code.

Another great way to get around comments is verbose code. You might type a few extra bits here and there, but ultimately you save yourself (and others) tons of head ache.

If you have a variable that contains say an address, call it $address. If it is the city, call it $city. If it’s the city from the address block of a user-registration table, call it $addresscityregistration. In the long run, having a very specific naming convention, and more importantly sticking to it, will help prevent a lot of errors in the variables.

I can’t count the times certain pieces of code didn’t work for me because the variables didn’t match entirely.