Hidden Features of PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

You can take advantage of the fact that the or operator has lower precedence than = to do this:

$page = (int) @$_GET['page'] 
  or $page = 1;

If the value of the first assignment evaluates to true, the second assignment is ignored. Another example:

$record = get_record($id) 
  or throw new Exception("...");