Trying to display full continent name based on 2 letter code - php

Question

I need to display site visitor's continent. I am using geoip functionality to pull 2 letter code, which I can get to work very easily. However, just displaying 'AS' for Asia to the site visitor is clearly undesirable. So I'm trying to convert that. This is what I am trying to do. . .
<?php
$continent = geoip_continent_code_by_name($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$africa = array('AF');
$antarctica = array('AN');
$asia = array('AS');
$europe = array('EU');
$northamerica = array('NA');
$oceania = array('OC');
$southamerica = array('SA');
if ($africa) {
echo 'Africa';
}
elseif ($antarctica) {
echo 'Antarctica';
}
elseif ($asia) {
echo 'Asia';
}
elseif ($europe) {
echo 'Europe';
}
elseif ($northamerica) {
echo 'North America';
}
elseif ($oceania) {
echo 'Australia and Oceania';
}
elseif ($southamerica) {
echo 'South America';
}
else {
echo '';
}
?>
It just displays 'Africa' no matter where the site visitor, so it's getting stuck there. I'm reading though PHP tutorials but can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. My if, else and elsifs look good as far as I can tell.

Answer 1

Well, you're kind of going about it wrong.
You're getting the code correctly with your first line, but then you are creating a bunch of different arrays, each containing one of the possible codes. Then you are checking for the existence of each array, and since you just created them, they do exist, so your IF block will stop with the first check and output Africa.
What you want to do is create one array that contains all the codes as keys, with the output name as values, and then just use the code you got from $_SERVER to return the matching value from that array. (I got the list of codes from the manual)
$continent = geoip_continent_code_by_name($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
$continents = [
'AF' => 'Africa',
'AN' => 'Antarctica',
'AS' => 'Asia',
'EU' => 'Europe',
'NA' => 'North America',
'OC' => 'Oceania',
'SA' => 'South America',
];
echo $continents[$continent];
It's worth a little explanation for WHY your IF block functions the way it does. PHP is loosely typed, meaning that you don't have to explicitly set the type of variables. So when PHP encounters a variable it has to guess about how to use it. So when you say if($africa), php tries to make sense of $africa in the context of a boolean question, and since it DOES exist and is not 0 or false, it sees it as TRUE and executes the first block.