Help Needed w/ PHP - If/Else

[TestCase]

I'm trying to help out a friend that has been stuck with a site built with a proprietary CMS.

In an effort to help her site's SEO, I've created a few hacks that should improve things, but my overall PHP-fu is weak.

I'm trying to hack the Description meta tag so that it will use a truncated portion of a variable (please excuse me if my nomenclature is incorrect) if that variable exists. If the variable does not exist, an alternate "standard" piece of information should be used.

What I think I'm looking for is an an "if else" sort of thing.

I came up with the following chunks of code that work individually, but I've been unsuccessful in getting them to work together as an "if else" statement.

Display the Variable Description

<?php
{
echo '<meta property="og:description" content="'.substr(strip_tags($getVARIABLE1['description']),0,110).'" />';
}
?>

Display the "Standard" Description

<?php
{
echo '<meta property="og:description" content="blah, blah, blah... Boilerplate text..." />';
}
?>

So in a nutshell...

If the variable exists/is not empty then use/display the truncated Variable, otherwise (else) display the Standard description.

Thank you in advance!

 

[TestCase]

YAY! Got it to work.

There's still a little tweaking that is needed to take out some uneeded spacing and line breaks, but the following code generally works and inserts the appropriate text depending on the situation.

<?php 
if(isset($getVARIABLE1)){
    echo '<meta property="og:description" content="'.substr(strip_tags($getVARIABLE1['description']),0,110).'" />';
} else{
    echo '<meta property="og:description" content="blah, blah, blah... Boilerplate text..." />';
}
?>
[\code]

 

[TestCase]

IMPROVED Version of the above code

As mentioned above, I still needed to refine the PHP in order to remove/strip/trim any extra spaces and line breaks so the description tag wouldn't contain anything that was unnecessary.

Here's the latest version that does all that and creates a clean, compact description tag.

<?php
if(isset($getVARIABLE1))
{
$metadescr = ($getVARIABLE1['description']);
$metadescr = preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", " ", $metadescr);
$metadescr = preg_replace("/\s+/", ' ', $metadescr);
 echo '<meta property="og:description" content="'.substr(strip_tags($metadescr),0,110).'..." />';
} else {
    echo '<meta property="og:description" content="blah, blah, blah... Boilerplate text..." />';
}
?>

 

[Efe]

Great you got it to work