Hi all,

I have seen code of the form:

if(file_exists("foo.php")
  include("foo.php");
else
  include("blah.php");

As far as I know, this is perfectly legal in php. What I was wondering was is it possible to do the following in in-line code in PHP?

if(file_exists("foo.php")
  // contains a specialised version of myFoo function
  include("foo.php");
else
{
  // define the default function here
  function myFoo($param)
  {
      // do something here
  }
}

So in other words I want to be able to define a function in my PHP code only if the specialised version does not exist. I need to do this without the use of classes and inheritance if possible, and I can't include a second file at this stage, just wondering if the above code is legal or not.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and time.

Regards,
darkagn

It should be, yes. You can define functions and classes withing an if block if you need to.

Doing something like this is pretty common:

<?php
if(!function_exists('myFoo')) {
    function myFoo() {
        echo "My Default Foo!";
    }
}
?>
commented: Thanks for the tip +3

That should work fine. I have done this sort of thing to prevent a double definition of a function as in:

if (!function_exists('abc')) {
 function abc() {
   ...

 }
}
commented: Thanks for the tip +3

Thank you both for the advice, I didn't know about the function_exists function. That's a great tip :)

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