What is a more elegant solution to these nested if/elseif statements?

Question

I\'m building a website that contains users with user profiles. Many of the fields in the profile are optional.

There is an opportunity for a lot of user-generate

Answer 1

I'd go with:

if( empty($names['display_name']) ) {
    $name = $names['first_name'] . ' ' $names['last_name'];
else
    $name = $names['display_name'];

$name = trim($name);
if( empty($name) ) 
    $name = 'user'.$names['id'];
if( empty($name) ) 
    $name = 'NULL';

This would be the 'core logic'... there will need to be other checks like $names != NULL or something..