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 would propose this:

public function nameify($names = null) {
    if(empty($names))
        return null;

    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'];
        }
        return $name;
    }

    if(!empty($names['id]))
        return 'user' . $names['id'];

    return null;
}