eager php newb requesting advice on wordpress code

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Designer just starting out with PHP looking for a more elegant solution

I’m trying to a create a div that only appears beside posts if they have comments. The only
code I can get to work is below & that’s by creating two variables I feel a more experienced person than myself wouldn’t need, I just can’t express what I’m looking for with code. This is my first week working with php so I’ve been googling for solutions & can only find examples of generating the number of comments with the wordpress function get_comments_number(); & then hiding the divs that have 0 with javascript which seems overly complicated for something so trivial.

I like to have something more like the bottom piece of code especially the way it outputs the singular & plural comments text after but I’m not competent enough yet.

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Any examples / advice would be greatly appreciated 

       <?php 
          $b = 0;
          $commBox = get_comments_number();

          if($commBox <=$b) {
                echo ""; 
          }else{
                echo "<div class="commentbox"> $commBox </div>"; 
        }?>

     <?php if ( have_comments() ); ?>
     <div class="commentbox">
     <?php printf( _n( '1 comment;', '%1$s comments;', get_comments_number(), 'ves'),
     number_format_i18n( get_comments_number() ) ); ?>
     </div>
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2 comments

  1. Have you tried running the following code. This would only create a div if the post did have comments, meaning you wouldn’t need any JavaScript to hide ones without, as they wouldn’t exist:

    <?php 

if ( get_comments_number() > 0 ) {

echo '<div class="commentbox">';

comments_number( 'no comments', 'one comment', '% comments' );

echo '</div>';

}

?>

    Notice the use of the comments_number() function which is good for what you wanted to do in regards to showing different values based on single or multiple comments. The function reference can be found here.

  2. A clean up to the top code (which I think is what you’re asking for would be:

       <?php 
      $commBox = get_comments_number();
      if($commBox) {
            echo "<div class="commentbox"> $commBox </div>"; 
    }
    ?>

    This just basically checks that $commBox is true (in PHP 0 is false, non zero numbers are true) and removes the uneccessary echo "".

    You could create a have_comments() function just by having a function that returns get_comments_number() but I’m not sure that’s necessary.

    Edit: Something like:

    echo "<div class="commentbox"> $commBox comment" . ($commBox == 1 ? 's' : '') . " </div>";

    Should show “comments” if there are more than 1 comment and “comment” if there is one comment (though this is untested).