Many many years ago I learned Delphi language. It has one interesting feature not found in other languages: you don’t need return statement to specify return value for a function. Instead, you can use a pseudo-variable called Result. You can change its value many times during function execution but only the last value is returned.
That’s really a great idea! Even if your programming language doesn’t have such a built-in variable, why not to create it?
Most functions actually need a variable to forge future return value, so why call it differently if we can always call it result?
For example, this tiny function extracts clean text from HTML fragment:
function getTextFromHtml($html)
{
$result = strip_tags($html, '<br>');
$result = preg_replace('/<BR\b.*?>/isu', "\n", $result);
$result = str_replace(' ', ' ', $result);
$result = htmlDecode($result);
$result = trim(preg_replace('/\s\s+/u', ' ', $result));
return $result;
}
As you can see, it uses $result variable to prepare return value and returns it in the last line. This greatly improves code readability as result name always refers to a variable, which value will be returned at the end of the function.
Using this code style you’ll always have this command in the last line of a function/method:
return $result;
This also improves ability to debug a function as you can simply set a breakpoint at the last line to see the return value.
For example this function decodes HTML encoded text:
function htmlDecode($text)
{
return html_entity_decode($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}
But how we can check the return value in the debugger or log it for debug purposes?
Let’s modify the function code to have result value saved to a variable before returning it:
function htmlDecode($text)
{
$result = html_entity_decode($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
return $result; //<-- Set a breakpoint here to see the result
}
Now you can easily check the value of $result variable in the debugger. You can also insert logging code before return statement to log the result value.
