Conditional ternary operator malfunctions (PHP)

debugcn Published at Dev

Angel Politis

I have built a function to change a given Y-m-d date like this: 2016-07-02 to this format: July 2nd.

The code:

// Format the given Y-M-D date
function format_date($date) {
    // Parse the date
    list($year, $month, $day) = array_values(date_parse($date));

    // Give the appropriate subscript to the day number
    $last_char = substr($day, -1);
    $pre_last_char = (strlen($day) > 1) ? substr($day, -2, -1) : null;
    $subscript = ($last_char === "1") ? "st" :
                 ($last_char === "2") ? "nd" :
                 ($last_char === "3") ? "rd" : "th";
    $subscript = ($pre_last_char === "1") ? "th" : $subscript;
    $day .= $subscript;

    // Get the month's name based on its number
    $months = [
        "1" => "January",
        "2" => "February",
        "3" => "March",
        "4" => "April",
        "5" => "May",
        "6" => "June",
        "7" => "July",
        "8" => "August",
        "9" => "September",
        "10" => "October",
        "11" => "November",
        "12" => "December"
    ];
    $month = $months[$month];

    // Omit the year if it's this year and assemble the date
    return $date = ($year === date("Y")) ? "$month $day $year" : "$month $day";
}

The function works as expected, but there's a catch. The first conditional ternary operator for $subscript returns "rd" for every number that ends in 1 and 2.

Example:

echo format_date("2016-01-01"); // It will output January 1rd

How can I fix that?

Alex Blex

Documentation reads:

Note: It is recommended that you avoid "stacking" ternary expressions. PHP's behaviour when using more than one ternary operator within a single statement is non-obvious:

<?php
// on first glance, the following appears to output 'true'
echo (true?'true':false?'t':'f');

// however, the actual output of the above is 't'
// this is because ternary expressions are evaluated from left to right

// the following is a more obvious version of the same code as above
echo ((true ? 'true' : false) ? 't' : 'f');

// here, you can see that the first expression is evaluated to 'true', which
// in turn evaluates to (bool)true, thus returning the true branch of the
// second ternary expression.
?>

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