What best practices should be followed when using conditional statements in PHP to avoid unexpected output?

When using conditional statements in PHP, it is important to use strict comparison operators (=== and !==) to avoid unexpected output due to type coercion. This ensures that both the value and type of the operands are compared. Additionally, it is good practice to always include curly braces {} around the code block following an if statement, even if it contains only a single line of code, to avoid potential bugs caused by ambiguity. 

// Example of using strict comparison operators and curly braces with conditional statements
$age = 18;

if ($age === 18) {
    echo "You are exactly 18 years old.";
} elseif ($age > 18) {
    echo "You are older than 18.";
} else {
    echo "You are younger than 18.";
}

Keywords

conditional statements PHP unexpected output error handling debugging

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