Improving readability using array_filter

Great trick by Freek Van der Herten: instead of selectively adding fields onto an array after having verified them to not being falsy – resulting in lots of if blocks in the code – it’s actually a lot easier/readable to fill the array first and then successively filter out the empty values using array_filter.

When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value.

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        return array_filter([
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'line2' => $this->line2,
            'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
            'location' => $this->location,
            'country' => $this->country,
        ]);
    }
}

In case that – for example – $this->busNumber had a value of null in the example above, it would be omitted from the returned array.

Improving readability using array_filter →