easier than switch

okay, so i know there's an easy way to do this, and i've seen it done, sure of it. so please forgive the stupidity of my question, i don't even know where to begin to look in the archives either... i have several forms on one page, they all submit a different variable, i then want to set one variable depending on that... okay, now i'm confusing myself, lets try explain it with some code... <? if(isset($_POST)) { $type = $_POST['news'] || $_POST['dreams'] || $_POST['storys'] || $_POST['words'] || $_POST['chat']; } ?> obviously this doesn't work. but i wanna set $type depending on which $_POST variable was sent. only one of these will ever be sent. rather than doing a big ass switch statement, is there no way i can get this into one line? i hope this isn't too confusing...