Control Flow

By the end of this lesson you'll make your PHP make decisions — branching with if , choosing between many options with switch and the safer PHP 8 match , and writing tidy one-liners with the ternary and template if: ... endif; syntax.

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Part of the free Php course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

What You'll Learn in This Lesson

1️⃣ if / elseif / else

An if statement runs a block of code only when its condition is true. A condition is any expression that's true or false — usually a comparison like $score >= 70 . Add elseif branches to test more conditions, and a final else as the catch-all. PHP checks them top to bottom and runs only the first block that's true, then skips the rest — so order matters. You can join conditions with && (both must be true) and || (either is enough).

Note that PHP spells it elseif as one word ( else if as two words also works). Because only the first true branch runs, the score 78 prints "Grade: C" and never even checks the lower branches.

2️⃣ switch / case / break / default

When you're comparing one value against a list of fixed options, a long if/elseif chain gets noisy. A switch reads better: you name the value once, then list each possible case . The crucial part is break — it tells PHP to stop once a case has run. Leave it out and PHP "falls through" into the next case and keeps going. default is the catch-all (like else ), and you can stack cases to share one block.

3️⃣ The PHP 8 match Expression

match (added in PHP 8) is a sharper switch. Three things make it nicer: it returns a value you can assign straight to a variable; it needs no break because it never falls through; and it compares with strict === , so the integer 200 won't accidentally match the string "200" . Each arm is value => result , arms are separated by commas, and one arm can list several values. Prefer match over switch for simple value-to-value mapping in PHP 8+.

4️⃣ Ternary ? : and Null-Coalescing ??

When a choice is small, a full if/else is overkill. The ternary operator packs it into one line that produces a value: condition ? ifTrue : ifFalse . Closely related is null coalescing ?? , which says "use the left value, or this fallback if the left is null or unset" — perfect for safe defaults like a guest name when no one is logged in. Keep ternaries to genuinely simple choices; nesting them quickly becomes unreadable.

5️⃣ Alternative if: ... endif; Syntax

PHP offers a second way to write control structures: drop the curly braces, put a colon after the condition, and close with an endif; keyword (there's also endswitch; , endwhile; , and so on). It behaves exactly like the brace version. Its purpose is readability in templates — when you weave PHP through chunks of HTML, a matching endif; is far easier to spot than a lonely '} buried in markup.

Because $loggedIn is true, only the first block's HTML is sent; the else markup is skipped entirely.

6️⃣ Your Turn — Fill in the Blanks

Time to practise. Each script below is almost complete — replace every ___ using the 👉 hint, then run it and check it against the Output panel.

Now a match . Fill in the missing result and the catch-all keyword so it returns the right label.

📋 Quick Reference — Control Flow

No code is filled in this time — just a brief and an outline. Write it yourself, run it on onecompiler.com/php or your own machine, then check your result against the expected output in the comments. This is exactly the decide-run-check loop you'll use on every real script.

Practice quiz

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