My problem can be boiled down to a snippet to see if text in $foo matches any of 3 other text items.

Here 'tis

<?
$foo = "a";

/* I want to find out if $foo matches any of 3 characters */

if ($foo == "x" || "y" || "z")
{
echo "if this prints something must be wrong";
}
echo "<br>end test";
?>

Thanks in advance for help on this.

Each of the conditions in an if statement is independent of one another:

PHP Code:

if($foo == 'x' || $foo == 'y' || $foo == 'z')
{
     echo "if this prints something must be wrong";
} 


I'm guessing in your code the message is always displayed, since in PHP, anything non-zero is true.

If you have a lot of conditions it may be easier to use in_array():

PHP Code:

if(in_array($foo, array('x', 'y', 'z')))
{
     echo "if this prints something must be wrong";
} 


Thanks NullPointer. Your "in_array" suggestion works and solved my problem.
But your explanation, citing this code as the correct way to use the "if" statement with multiple terms still did not work for me.

<?
$foo = 'a';
if($foo == 'x' || $foo == 'y' || $foo = 'z') 
{ 
     echo "if this prints something must be wrong"; 
}
?>

Typo on my part. The last condition should be:
$foo == 'z'

Within the context of an conditional, an assignment returns the value being assigned. So $foo = 'z' while technically legal, is the same as 'z'. Had this been java the complier would have pointed this out.

Thanks again, NullPointer. I didn't notice the single "=" when I tested your suggestion. Now it works, of course.

Thought I was loosing my mind. Some say I already have