What does RETURN TRUE do in a php function?

Question

I was just looking at this code and i don't understand what RETURN TRUE does or what the point of it is? Can someone please explain?

class Elephpant {

    public $colour;

    public function dance() {
        echo "elephpant dances!\n";
        return true;
    }
}

Thankyou in advance ;-)

Answer 1

In that specific piece of code - not very much.

In general however it would be used to return a condition of a validation or code that needs to return either a positive or a negative.

For instance, one would do the following:

public function isValidEmail($email) {
    // do work to see if email is valid
    if(/* Condition making it true */)
       return true;
    else
       return false;
}

Answer 2

It returns the boolean TRUE to whatever called dance(). That's all.

You would have to look at the consuming code to see if it makes something from it.

Answer 3

Logically, returns boolean TRUE, but in this case doesn't make any sense since it'll return TRUE anyways.

Answer 4

Sometimes a method/function returns a boolean value to indicate if the operation was succesfull. In the given example it always returns "TRUE".

The calling code can then act upon succesfull completion of the code

if(dance()) echo "succes" else echo "fails"

Answer 5

You can read more about return here: http://www.php.net/return

There are few interesting applications of return like returning value from include-d file.

Answer 6

because it's TRUE, elephpant does dance ;)