PHP for Absolute Beginners

2.6. Control Structures

To add power and convenience to your scripts, PHP supports a number of conditional statements, loops, and other control structures that allow us to manipulate data easily throughout your code.

The control structures supported by PHP are:

• if

• else

• elseif/else if

• while

• do-while

• for

• foreach

• break

• continue

• switch

• return

• require

• include

• require_once

• include_once

• goto

2.6.1. if, else, and else if

The most basic control structure is the if statement. It defines a block of code between curly braces ({}) that is to be executed only if a condition is met:

<?php

    $foo = 5;

    if($foo < 10) {
        echo "The condition was met. <br />";
    }

?>

In this program, nothing is output if $foo doesn't meet your condition. In some cases, this is an unacceptable result, ...