Incrementing and displaying a field if not empty

Question

I've got this code to work, but being really new to PHP, I don't know if this is proper. This is my first time using PHP to increment.

1. I have 10 fields for YouTube videos (using Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress - I don't have the repeater fields and won't be getting them)
2. The video/html elements only show if the corresponding video field is not empty

Are the variables correctly placed?

Are there better ways to do this?

 <?php
 $vidnum = 'video_';
 for($n=0; $n<=9; $n++) {
 $next = $vidnum.($n +1 );
 $video = get_field('' . $next . '');
 if (!empty($video))
 echo '<div class="video ' . $next . '">' . $video . '</div>';
 }
 ?>

Answer 1

 $vidnum = 'video_';

Presumably $vidnum is short for $video_number, but this isn't a video number. It's the prefix before the video number.

 $video_number_prefix = 'video_';

You can go ahead and call it what it is.

 for($n=0; $n<=9; $n++) {
 $next = $vidnum.($n +1 );

You say that you have ten fields but you write 9. There are two ways to write it with 10.

 for ( $n = 0; $n < 10; $n++ ) {

But the second works better with your $next variable, which I'm going to rename to $video_identifier.

 for ( $i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++ ) {
 $video_identifier = 'video_' . $i;

You don't need to save the value of the string literal. You only use it once, so you can just use it.

Starting with 1 instead of 0 means that you don't have to add 1 to the value before using it.

I switched from $n to $i, as $i is a more common loop iteration variable.

 $video = get_field('' . $next . '');

This seems more complicated than it needs to be.

 $video = get_field($video_identifier);

Adding the empty strings doesn't seem to accomplish anything.

 if (!empty($video))
 echo '<div class="video ' . $next . '">' . $video . '</div>';

The single statement version of an if is harder to read and maintain.

 if ( ! empty($video) ) {
 echo '<div class="video ' . $video_identifier . '">' . $video . '</div>' . "\n";
 }

I also added a line break at the end. Functionally this won't matter, but it makes the HTML easier to read.

The whole thing:

<?php
 for ( $i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++ ) {
 $video_identifier = 'video_' . $i;
 $video = get_field($video_identifier);
 if ( ! empty($video) ) {
 echo '<div class="video ' . $video_identifier . '">' . $video . '</div>' . "\n";
 }
 }
?>

This also fixes your indentation issues.

Note that I'm not commenting on your use of get_field. Looking at the documentation, it seems that get_field depends heavily on the configuration. Without the configuration, that is off-topic for review.

• alexwc_: whoa, great answer. Works just perfectly. get_field is just part of Advanced Custom Fields - so no worries about that.