adding up sums of multiple variables in php - php

Question

ok
so I have been stuck on this problem for a while and I'm sure there is a more elegant way of doing it.
I have 3 columns in a database -
Stand1 | Stand2 | Stand3
each column will either have a stand number (i.e D30) or 'Not Assigned'
What I need to do is count how many stands have been assigned to that customer.
For example :
D30 | not assigned | not assigned would = 1
D30 | B30 | E30 = 3
The code I have so far is
if ($row["stand1"] == 'Not Assigned') {
$stand1 = '0';
}
else {
$stand1 = '1';
}
if ($row["stand2"] == 'Not Assigned') {
$stand2 = '0';
}
else {
$stand2 = '1';
}
if ($row["stand3"] == 'Not Assigned') {
$stand3 = '0';
}
else {
$stand3 = '1';
}
I then thought I could try and count how many stand were assigned :
$standcount = $stand1 + $stand2 + $stand3
But when I print this out (everything else is in an array so loops through every customer) all I get is the total 3 for every customer.
I tried saving the data into an array like:
$standcount = array($stand1, $stand2, $stand3);
But I get the same result. I thought a foreach loop may work but not sure how to do it.

Answer 1

I would suggest you to:
Set the columns' default value to NULL, so that if no value is provided in an entry you'll have a null value instead of a string (that can contains different letters, as in your case). After that you can simply perform the isset() check against each value.
Use a function to avoid code repetition (the main source of errors), something like:
function check($value) {
return (isset($value)) ? 1 : 0;
}
$stand_1 = check($row["stand1"]);
$stand_2 = check($row["stand2"]);
$stand_3 = check($row["stand3"]);
If you instead want to use a string as "Not Assigned" or "NA", you can perform a case-insensitive check with strcasecmp() between the strings in case, for any reason, a value contains an extra space or a lower-case letter.
In this case the check function would be:
function check($str) {
return (strcasecmp($str, "NA") == 0) ? 0 : 1;
}
$stand_1 = check($row["stand1"]);
$stand_2 = check($row["stand2"]);
$stand_3 = check($row["stand3"]);