Display formatted list of taxonomy terms with last seperator different

Question

I am trying to display a list of event producers, which are stored as a taxonomy. For each event (custom post type) there can be anywhere between 1 and many producers, so I would like to list them, comma separated, with a "&" between the second to last one and last one. The below function does the job, except in the case of only having one producer. How would I make this work for 1 producer or many producers at the same time?

function the_producers($post_id = false) {
    if ($post_id == false) {
        $post_id = get_the_ID();
    }
    $producers = get_the_terms($post_id, 'producers');
            $prods = array();
    foreach ($producers as $producer) {
            $prods[] = $producer->name;
    }
    $str = array_pop($prods);
    if ($prods) {
        $str = implode(', ', $prods).' & '.$str;
        return $str;
    } else {
        return false;
    }   
}

I've tried counting the number of iterations and if there's only 1, just returning the single producer, but that doesn't seem to display anything for some reason:

function the_producers($post_id = false) {
    if ($post_id == false) {
        $post_id = get_the_ID();
    }
    $producers = get_the_terms($post_id, 'producers');
            $prods = array();
            $cnt = 0;
    foreach ($producers as $producer) {
            $cnt++;
            $prods[] = $producer->name;
    }
    if ($cnt == 1) {
        $str = $producer->name;
    } else {
        $str = array_pop($prods);
        if ($prods) {
            $str = implode(', ', $prods).' & '.$str;
            return $str;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Instead of counting inside your foreach loop, why not count the result from get_the_terms. Something like this

$q = count($producers);

From that, you can then use a conditional like

if( 1 == $q ) {
  // do something when only one term exists
}else{
  // do something for mutliple terms
}

Answer 2

This is working. Pieter Gossen's method of counting is better, so I implemented that as well:

function the_producers($post_id = false) {
    if ($post_id == false) {
        $post_id = get_the_ID();
    }
    $producers = get_the_terms($post_id, 'producers');
    $q = count($producers);
    if( 1 == $q ) {
        $str = reset($producers)->name;
        return $str;
    } elseif ($q > 1) {
        $prods = array();
        foreach ($producers as $producer) {
        $prods[] = $producer->name;
        }
        $str = array_pop($prods);
        if ($prods) {
            $str = implode(', ', $prods).' & '.$str;
            return $str;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}