Question

I just transferred a PHP website from a Linux server to Windows. Everything seems to function the same except one huge difference:

On the Linux server, the following piece of code is ignored when $_GET['action'] is not set:

$action = $_GET['action'];
if($action=='add'){
    echo 'good';
}

However, this prevents the page from loading on the Windows server.

What does work is:

if(isset($_GET['action'])){
    $action = $_GET['action'];
}else{
    $action='';
}

if($action=='add'){
    echo 'good';
}

2 questions:

1. Is there a way to configure the server to be more forgiving of variables that don’t have a value?

2. Is the second code example better practice?

Answer 1

Is there a way to configure the server to be more forgiving of variables that don't have a value?

putting an @ symbol infront of the variable will tell php to ignore the error. but i consider this as bad practice.

Is the second code example better practice?

i do consider it as a good practice, it is always good to check.

IMO you should go for second, you can always use a ternary operator. so instead of

if(isset($_GET['action'])){
    $action = $_GET['action'];
}else{
    $action='';
}

you can write

$action = isset($_GET['action']) ? $_GET['action'] : '';

both does the same thing.