PHP “or” Syntax

Question

I\'ve seen this a lot: $fp = fopen($filepath, \"w\") or die(); But I can\'t seem to find any real documentation on this \"or\" syntax. It\'s obvious enough what

Answer 1

It's a logical operator and can be used in any logical expression.

http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.logical.php

Answer 2

This is neat trick, inherited from some PHP predecessor, based on the fact that PHP quite smartly won't evaluate any expression following OR, if first one returned true:

function a($ret){
    echo "FOO";
    return $ret;
}
function b($ret){
    echo "BAR";
    return $ret;
}

$result = (a(true) OR b(true));

will print out only FOO, means b() weren't even executed.