Michael Gareth Morgan

I’m currently in the process of rebuilding one of my older sites from the ground up. One thing that the new version makes use of is a field in several database tables called ’state’. Basically, this holds an integer value ranging from 0 upwards where each number represents a specific meaning. For example…

0: Inactive
1: Active
2: Processed
3: Archived

The reasons for doing this are quite simple; it saves space in the database and is also a lot easier (and nicer) to work with.

Now, previously, when for example I wanted to loop through each row and display the textual meaning of each of the values I would either use a switch statement or a big if-else statement block. Now though I make use of a much simpler method…

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function number_state($state = 0, $labels = array())
{
	$text = $labels[$state];
 
	if($text == "")
		$text = "Unknown";
 
	return $text;
}

This function simply takes two parameters. The first is the number itself; the second is an array of the corresponding value meanings. To use it just do this…

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echo number_state(1, array("State zero", "State one", "State two", "State three"));

Or, in a simple loop…

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for($i = 0; $i <= 3; $i++)
{
	echo number_state($i, array("State zero", "State one", "State two", "State three"));
}

It’s a nice and simple solution to a simple problem. From my perspective it is much better having something like this compared to big chunks of code doing the same thing.

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