Reputation: 13367

xor symbol representation?

PHP manual doesn't say that there is one, but... maybe there's a hidden one?

Simply, I like using if's with symbolic operation representations, that way I'm sure that when searching through a document, I'll always find what I'm looking for. But with xor there's possibility that my code contains such a string/value or something. Like, method in template class - exorcize();.

Upvotes: 2

Answers (5)

paxdiablo

Reputation: 881563

The exclusive-or operator in PHP is ^.

If you want to use xor (in any language, really, not just PHP) but you're worried about searches for it finding things like exorcize, you could just search for " xor " (with a space on either side).

Or, any regular expression that prevents the surrounding text from being part of the xor word, such as (example only):

[^a-zA-Z0-9_]xor[^a-zA-Z0-9_]

Upvotes: 6

Casey Chu

Reputation: 25463

You could use != if they're both already booleans.

if (true != false) // xor
    ...

Of course, this has the same issue with getting false positives in your search results, so perhaps you can adopt a personal convention (at the risk of confusing your co-workers) of using the other PHP not-equal operator:

if (true <> false) // xor
    ...

If they're not already booleans, you'll need to cast them.

if (!$a <> !$b) // xor
    ...

Edit: After some experimentation with PHP's very lax type coercion, I give you a pseudo-operator of own creation, the ==! operator! $a ==! $b is equivalent to $a xor $b.

if ('hello' ==! 0) // equivalent to ('hello' xor 0)
    ...

This is actually 'hello' == !0 > 'hello' == true > true == true > true, which is why it works as xor. This works because when PHP compares one boolean with anything else, it converts the second argument to boolean too.

Upvotes: 5