PHP offers a alternative syntax for some of its control structures- if, while, for, foreach, and switch, where you change the opening brace to a colon (:) and the closing brace to endif;, endwhile;, endfor;, endforeach;, or endswitch;, respectively. The main advantage I’ve found in using this syntax is that it makes deeply nested code intelligible to read. If you have a deeply nested code it sometime becomes hard to pair the starting and ending brace. With the colon syntax you just have to match a ‘if’ with a ‘endif’ or a ‘for’ with a ‘endfor’. When you are mixing HTML with PHP in web pages the code can become quite dense and confusing if it uses a lot of braces. At that time the colon syntax can come quite handy.

A example function using the colon syntax is shown below:

function is_array_ordered($array)
{
    $i=0;
 
    if(is_array($array)):
        $total_elements = count($array);
 
        while($total_elements > 1):
            if($array[$i] < $array[$i+1]):
                $i++;
                $total_elements--;
            else:
                return false;
            endif;
        endwhile;
 
        return true;
    endif;
}
 
$test_array = array(0,1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10);
echo is_array_ordered($test_array);