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

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    if ($names) {
        if (!empty($names['display_name'])) {
            return $names['display_name'];
        }
        if (!empty($names['first_name'])) {
            $name = $names['first_name'];
        } 
        if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
        }
        if (empty($name) && !empty($names['id'])) {
            $name = 'user' . $names['id'];
        }
    }
    return $name ? ltrim($name) : 'NULL';
}

Set the default first, and return that if nothing else matches. Then since we always want to return the display name if we have it do just that.

EDIT: Tweak to prevent returning "NULL "