Summary

In this chapter, you learned about control structures and the ways in which they can help to make your scripts flexible and dynamic. Most of these structures will reappear regularly throughout the rest of the book.

You learned how to define an if statement and how to provide for alternative actions with the elseif and else clauses. You learned how to use the switch statement to change flow according to multiple equivalence tests on the result of an expression. You learned about loopsin particular, the while and for statementsand you learned how to use break and continue to prematurely end the execution of a loop or to skip an iteration. You learned how to nest one loop within another and saw a typical use for this structure. Finally, you looked at a technique for using PHP start and end tags in conjunction with conditional code blocks, to alleviate having to escape (use the backslash in front of) special characters such as the quotation mark and dollar sign.

You should now know enough of the basics to write scripts of your own that make decisions and perform repetitive tasks. In the next chapter, we will be looking at a way of adding even more power to your applications. You will learn how functions enable you to organize your code, preventing duplication and improving reusability.