Null Coalescing Operator

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Today I am going to discuss the new feature in PHP 7 i.e. “Null Coalescing Operator”.

PHP 7 brings a new rather handy feature null coalescing operator. This new feature is similar to the ternary operator that we were using in older versions of PHP (PHP 5 & greater). As per the ternary operator, we are getting the second element if the condition is true, else, the third element if a statement is false. But, PHP 7 allows us to skip the second element and gives us a short form to use this feature. Please follow the below example for the reference.

// $a is not set
$b = 16;
echo $a ?? 2; // outputs 2
echo $a ?? $b ?? 7; // outputs 16

Here, on the 3rd line PHP checks if the variable $a is set i.e. isset() (to be precise) or not then it will output the next parameter. In our general coding language, it would be like this.

if(isset($a)){
   echo $a;
}else{
   echo 2;
}

For the 4th line, the same process will be followed. PHP first checks if the variable $a is set or not, then, check if $b is set or not else it will output the last element. In general, the execution will be.

if(isset($a)){
    echo $a;
}elseif(isset($b)){
    echo 16;
}else{
    echo 7;
}

This is one of the small features in PHP which enhances the performance. This feature is very useful because, as we are using a number of loops in our code and if PHP gets a chance to skip through those conditions it will increase the performance of our script.

That’s all for now. Feel free to leave a comment below. Let me know what you think about this blog. Good bye and happy coding 🙂

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Tagged PHP