Multiple procedure assignment for self variable in one line

Question

Is there any way a variable can be assigned from multiple procedures in one line?

For example:

$class_splits = explode("\\", $class_name);
$short_class_name = $class_splits[count($class_splits) - 1] ?? null;

Translated to this pseudo code:

$short_class_name = explode("\\", $class_name) => prev_result(count(prev_result) -1);

I don't have big expectations on this as I know it looks too "high-level" but not sure if newer versions of PHP can handle this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use an assignment as an expression, then refer to the variable that was assigned later in the containing expression.

$short_class_name = ($class_splits = explode("\\", $class_name))[count($class_splits) - 1] ?? null;

That said, I don't recommend coding like this. If the goal was to avoid creating another variable, it doesn't succeed at that. It just makes the whole thing more complicated and confusing.

Answer 2

I believe you have an "X/Y Problem": your actual requirement seems to be "how to split a string and return just the last element", but you've got stuck thinking about a particular solution to that.

As such, we can look at the answers to " How to get the last element of an array without deleting it? " To make it a one-line statement, we need something that a) does not require an argument by reference, and b) does not require the array to be mentioned twice.

A good candidate looks like array_slice , which can return a single-element array with just the last element, from which we can then extract the string with [0] :

$short_class_name = array_slice(explode("\\", $class_name), -1)[0];