http://snippets.dzone.com/posts Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:40:05 GMT DZone Snippets: coalesce code http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3664 Here's something I keep on having to do in PHP and other languages. Often I need to find the first non-empty value from a set of arguments. Here's how I do it. <br /><code> <br />function coalesce() { <br /> $args = func_get_args(); <br /> foreach ($args as $arg) { <br /> if (!empty($arg)) { <br /> return $arg; <br /> } <br /> } <br /> return $args[0]; <br />} <br /></code> <br />The function assumes that it will be called with at least one value. It can be trivially altered to use is_null() instead if that suits. Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:00:32 GMT http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3664 keith (Keith Gaughan)