Creating optional generators in PHP

I’m struggling with creating optional generator functions in PHP. Essentially, I’m trying to build a function that only turns into a generator if there are multiple values and behaves like a normal function if only a single value is present.

Per the official documentation:

Any function containing yield is a generator function.

A simple yet easy rule to follow by. However, with things I’ve recently been working on I’ve been having trouble with this. In particular, I haven’t found a clean way to implement generator functions in a way that allows me to only return a generator if necessary. A quick example:

function generatorTest() {
    if(false) {
        yield 0;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}

var_dump(generatorTest()); // object(Generator)

Looking at the code, one might expect to only get the value, but as it turns out, a functions is turned into a generator really anytime it contains the yield keyword. Which is in line with the documentation, but questionable. Even if the yield keyword is unreachable, the function is turned into a generator. A simple way around this would be to return a closure that itself is a generator, so the function itself isn’t turned into a generator:

function generatorTest() {
    if(false) {
        return (function() {
            yield 0;
        })();
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}

var_dump(generatorTest()); // int(0)

And this, while not the cleanest workaround, actually works. However, with the application I’m currently working on, this is rather impractical, because I’m not just yielding/returning a simple value but instead iterate complex requests to an API. As a result I’d have two blocks that are rather similar and unnecessarily bloat the function.

I also looked into alternatives and came up with this:

function generatorTest() {
    $ret = (function() {
        if(false) {
            yield 0;
        } else {
            return 0;
        }
    })();
    
    try {
        return $ret->getReturn();
    } catch(Exception $e) {
        return $ret;
    }
}

var_dump(generatorTest()); // int(0)

Instead of returning a function that is a generator if necessary, it always creates a generator and checks if any return value is present. It doesn’t bloat the code because it always returns a function with only the return and yield actually branching off, everything else would have to be written only once. However it basically intentionally uses exceptions to check if it’s actually a generator or just a normal value that was returned. Which really is kinda ugly.

So here is the question, is there a better way to create optional generator functions, as in functions that are only generators if a condition applies and otherwise will just return as normal? Am I entirely off on my modeling and should look at a different approach? Or is my case so out-of-this-world that my ugly solution is pretty much the best for that situation?

Edit: Additional details on the apllication

The application in question is this MediaWiki bot. Specifically, I’m currently working on this function, which already uses the second method I mentioned in my example, but stores all data it loads before return the generator, which pretty much defeats the purpose of the generator and is neither efficient nor useful, because I have to wait like an hour before I know if it actually works when performing a large number of requests.

The function mentioned above is used to query revisions on a wiki and the idea was to provide different return types depending on what you want to query. Since overloading is not really possible in PHP, this is the result I got. When calling the function with a single id, it would look like this:

require_once("bottibott_v5/src/autoload.php");

$bot = new Bot(URL); // URL is the url to the api endpoint of the wiki
$revisions = new Revisions($bot);
$revisions->setIds("1");

var_dump($revisions->getRevisionsFromRevids()); // would output some kind of revision record, depending on the wiki

Meanwhile when calling the same function with multiple ids, the request would look like this:

require_once("bottibott_v5/src/autoload.php");

$bot = new Bot(URL); // URL is the url to the api endpoint of the wiki
$revisions = new Revisions($bot);
$revisions->setIds(range(0, 10));

foreach($revisions->getRevisionsFromRevids() as $revision) {
    var_dump($revision); // would output each revision record individually
}