Pumka.net Blog

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', ' ', $result);
    $result = str_replace('&nbsp;', ' ', $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
}

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.