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How to refactor complex if statements

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Have you every come across confusing if statements with complex conditionals such as this? I bet you did!

// please kill me 🤯 
if (!(($this->shipping_country == "GB" || (strcmp($this-status, "Valid") !== 0)) {

To me, this is completely unreadable.

In the video below I show how I deal with this situation. Spoiler: add some tests around it and break the conditionals apart.

This video is part of the Mailcoach video course. It contains many more videos on how to write clear code. You can use this coupon code to get a nice discount of $10.

YES-I-WANT-TO-WRITE-READABLE-CODE

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Bishir Abubakr Rungumi liked on 21st February 2020
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Gaurav Makhecha replied on 20th February 2020
1/ @freekmurze shares a video where he explains how to refactor complex if statements and making your code more readable as well as maintainable 😎 twitter.com/freekmurze/sta…
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Roberto Gallea replied on 19th February 2020
if (!$this->isNotAlmostTrue(!$uncertain)) { ... }
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That's insane. 🤯
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Azamat X replied on 18th February 2020
This one is much pretty than those I've seen.
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Sylvain Fertons replied on 18th February 2020
😍 I generally prefer to use "private" methods, and then switch to "protected" if needed. But 99% of my favorites developers use "protected" most of the time. Am I missing something?
abhishek retweeted on 18th February 2020
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Pierre-Luc Brunet replied on 18th February 2020
Also, while I have your attention. I’ve seen most of your tweets for the last couple of weeks. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are either a set of identical triplets or a robot. Nobody does that much in 24 hours. Which is it?
Mattias Geniar replied on 18th February 2020
It's good to learn from those videos too, quality material! 👌
Freek Van der Herten replied on 18th February 2020
Yeah, me too!
Freek Van der Herten replied on 18th February 2020
Yeah, indeed 🙂
Freek Van der Herten replied on 18th February 2020
Watch those videos closely, Mattias :-) Nah, you’re already doing lots of good stuff, specially adding tests with each PR 👍
Freek Van der Herten replied on 18th February 2020
I think in the client projects where I work in it doesn’t make a lot of difference. In open source it’s nice for package users to have an escape hatch and not to hammer everything down with private (and final).
Pierre-Luc Brunet replied on 18th February 2020
This if statement make me a little sick.
Frank de Jonge replied on 18th February 2020
total syntax error too! 😱
Mattias Geniar replied on 18th February 2020
I feel caught 😅