Trying to add two different strings in PHP - php

Question

I came up with an solution for not showing an sidebar in Wordpress when this is not filled with widgets. I did this by calling for the slug from the current page and named my sidebars the same as the slugs from my pages.
I use the Custom Sidebars plugin to add sidebars. This plugin adds 'cs-' in the id of a sidebar before the name of the sidebar. So for example I've named my sidebar 'Test' than the id of the sidebar will be 'cs-test'.
Now I want my php code to check if the sidebar is named the same as the slug from the page. So I called the_slug and before the slug I want to add cs-. With some help I came up with this:
<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'cs-'.the_slug(false) ) ) { ?>
<?php dynamic_sidebar( is_active_sidebar( 'cs-'.the_slug(false) ) ) ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>
But that doesn't seems to help. Any thoughts how to fix this? Thanks already!

Answer 1

Your are concatenating a string cs- with a function the_slug(false). This might cause the error, depending on what the function is returning.
Solution 1:
You could call and save the function beforehand and concate two vars:
<?php
$slug = the_slug(false); //Get return value
$slug = (string)$slug; //Force string conversion
$slug = 'cs-'.$slug; //Concate
if ( is_active_sidebar( $slug ) ) { ?>
<?php dynamic_sidebar( is_active_sidebar( $slug ) ) ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>
.
Solution 2:
If you need this type of functionality often try to add a string parameter to the the_slug() function (should be a custom function in your functions.php) and do the concatenating within the function itself:
function the_slug($boolen, $string='') {
//Your code
return $string.$your_var;
}
Your sidebar code would look like this:
<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( the_slug(false, 'cs-') ) ) { ?>
<?php dynamic_sidebar( is_active_sidebar( the_slug(false, 'cs-') ) ) ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>