Question

Are these two statements executed identically, given $thing could be of any type?

if (!empty($thing)) {
    // do stuff
}

if ($thing) {
    // do stuff
}

I’m aware I could try it, but I’m not sure I’d catch all the edge cases… I’m afraid in some situations they would execute identically, but not all.

Answer 1

If $thing is undefined, then if ($thing) would throw a (non-fatal) error while if (!empty($thing)) would return false.

See empty() in the PHP documentation.