The Null coalescing operator is a recent addition to PHP. It was introduced in PHP 7 (released in December 2015), more than 10 years after the feature was proposed for the first time.
In Javascript, the logical OR operator can be used for this purpose for ages (since Javascript was created?!).
As the documentation explains:
Logical OR (||
)
expr1 || expr2
Returns expr1
if it can be converted to true
; otherwise, returns expr2
.
Thus, when used with Boolean values, ||
returns true
if either operand is true
; if both are false
, returns false
.
Instead of writing
var name = obj['name'] ? obj['name'] : 'GOD';
you can use the shorter:
var name = obj['name'] || 'GOD';
The ||
operator can be used several times to create a longer expression that evaluates to the value of the first operand that is not empty:
var name = obj['name'] || obj['desc'] || 'GOD';