Terinary operator in PHP

[Useless]

Fuck me with a stick.

I have this piece of code which pulls words from flatfile databases:

$sentence = ($type ?
		"$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0]" :
		"$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0] $word5[0]");

In it's present form, I can only produce two different layouts for word strings, aka sentences. I'd like to be able to offer more layouts, but I can't figure out how to add another line without getting an error. Damn it. It's that fucking colon.

[cd34]

that statement means:

if ($type) {
  $sentence = "$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0]";
} else {
  $sentence = "$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0] $word5[0]";
}

[Useless]

Neat, thanks. A little more understandable for a guy like me. I swapped out the original code with yours and all worked well. Here is where I run into trouble though. I'd like to be able to add a third expression, but can't figure out how. My top secret script 'chooses' which sentence to to create from the two current expressions. Is it possible to add a third expression to that? It works fine as is, but could be made better in the future if I was able to add more junk.

[cd34]

$type would need to have more than a true/false value.

you could do something like

switch ($type) {
  case 0: 
     $sentence = "$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0]";
     break;
  case 1: 
    $sentence = "$word1[0] $word2[0] $word3[0] $word4[0] $word5[0]";
    break;
  case 2:
    asdfhaskdhflasjdhflashdf
    break;
  default:
     asdjhflasjhdfljashdflkjhasdf
     break;
}

Then you just have to set $type to something other than 0/1 or false/true.

[Useless]

Woohoo! It works! Thank you.
With $type = mt_rand(0,3); it works just as I had hoped.

You da man

[cd34]

nah, just one of 3.1 billion.