There must be a better way (php, string)

I want to display a user's firstname if they gave us one, otherwise their email. The code below functions, but I don't like how it takes so many lines, I vaguely recall some way of maybe doing this with OR? I have (essential开发者_JAVA技巧ly):

if ($firstname == "")
{
$name   = $email;
}else{
$name = $firstname;
}
echo $name;

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echo ($firstname) ? $firstname : $email;

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The shorter version (PHP 5)

echo ($firstname ? : $email);

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This is a less common but sometimes useful construct (as alternative to the ?: syntax):

 $name = $firstname   OR   $name = $email;