So, I think what you want is:

$name = @$_GET['name'] :? ‘default’;

isset returns a boolean, so your latter

isset($arr[$name]) ?: 'default'

returns true or ‘default’.

I’m going to say that I prefer the syntactic sugar of using avalue. While I use it a lot, it’s not a huge CPU hog and it adds a nice hook for debugging. I put in assert statements to make sure that $name is not NULL and is a proper scalar. This finds a variety of errors.

Translating the above $language_path to your syntax becomes:

$language_path = @$languages[@$_GET['language'] :? $def_lang] :? $languages[$def_lang];


Which isn’t too shabby, actually, though it may confuse some…

Thanks for the comments!

$name = isset($_GET['name']) ? $_GET['name'] : ‘default’;

or

$name = @$_GET['name'] ? $_GET['name'] : ‘default’;

or (php 5.3) shorter

$name = @$_GET['name'] ?: ‘default’;

or better still (php 5.3) longer

$name = isset($_GET['name']) ?: ‘default’;

personally if you’re running php 5.3+ then i would use
$name = isset($_GET['name']) ?: ‘default’;
instead of avalue() ;-)

Kind regards,
Scott