This will probably seem trivial and obvious to most PHP users out there but some of you might find this simple function useful. There are a lot of times when you’ll want to do a quick comparison and then, for example, give an HTML element a specific class based on what you found. The following is a short and sweet function I include in all of my projects to make this easy to do:

<?php
	function check_equal($val1, $val2, $response)
	{
		if ($val1 == $val2)
		{
			return $response;
		}
	}
?>

Here’s an example of this function in action:

<?php
	echo '<div'.check_equal($user, 1, ' class="author"').'>';
?>

In the example above, whenever the value of $user is equal to 1 then the div will be written out with the class of “author” attached to it. Now I can make some changes to my CSS to style that div differently based on the value of the PHP variable $user.