can someone help me with this trim and conditional statement

$_REQUEST['statement'] = (trim($_REQUEST['statement']) != "" ? $_REQUEST['statement'] : $_LANG['Nostatement']);

Hi all,

Can someone tell me what the above is doing? Statement is always truncated in output, obviously because of trim, but what does the whole statement do?

Can i just take out trim?
Is the trim the problem, i thought it only takes out whitespaces.

It is the equivalent of:


if((trim($_REQUEST['statement']) != "")
{
$_REQUEST['statement'] = $_REQUEST['statement'];
}
else
{
$_REQUEST['statement'] = $_LANG['Nostatement'];
}

The ?: is called a ternary operator.
BTW The code should check if $_REQUEST['statement'] is actaully set before doing things with it.

yes ur right

so this isn't the line of code truncating output?

No, the value is trimmed for comparison. But it's not changed if the trimmed value is not an empty string.