Check whether a variable exists and not empty in PHP

These functions are useful when you want to perform a data validation whether in PHP or WordPress.

isset()

isset() determines if a variable exists.

Things to remember

• It actually checks if the declared variable is declared and is everything else but null.
• isset will return false if you check against a variable with null value.
  • A null character (“\0”) is not same as the PHP null constant.
• If you pass multiple variables in isset() then all of those variables need to exist to get “true” in return. If one of them doesn’t exist, it will return false.

Example

$a = "test";
$b = "anothertest";

var_dump(isset($a));     // TRUE
var_dump(isset($a, $b)); // TRUE

unset ($a);

var_dump(isset($a));     // FALSE
var_dump(isset($a, $b)); // FALSE

$foo = NULL;
var_dump(isset($foo));   // FALSE

isset() for elements in arrays

$a = array ('test' => 1, 'hello' => NULL, 'pie' => array('a' => 'apple'));

var_dump(isset($a['test']));            // TRUE
var_dump(isset($a['foo']));             // FALSE
var_dump(isset($a['hello']));           // FALSE

// Checking deeper array values
var_dump(isset($a['pie']['a']));        // TRUE
var_dump(isset($a['pie']['b']));        // FALSE

empty()

empty() function checks whether a variable is empty.

Things to remember

• It will return true if the variable doesn’t exist or the value is equal to false.
• If empty() returns true, it doesn’t always mean that the variable doesn’t exist.

Example

$var = 0;

// Evaluates to true because $var is empty
if (empty($var)) {
    echo '$var is either 0, empty, or not set at all';
}

If you evaluate the variable above with isset(), it’ll return true.

$var = 0;

// Evaluates as true because $var is set
if (isset($var)) {
    echo '$var is set even though it is empty';
}

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