Question

I noticed this weird evaluation yesterday after searching for a few hours in my code for an error. i am passing scores into php, sometimes the score=0 which causes an issue.

send php ?blah=blah&score=0

if(!empty($_REQUEST['score']){
    //do database update stuff
}else{
   // show entire webpage
}

It works great unless the score=0 the if() will evaluate to false and return the entire webpage to my ajax handler and error. I have temporarily changed !empty to isset but this will cause problems in the future because isset evaluates to true even if the score key is in the url string without a value.
ex: (?blah=blah&score=&something=else)

my question is: what is the best way to recode this to work correctly now and in the future?

edit: there are a few working answers here, i appreciate everyones time. it was difficult to choose an answer

Answer 1

Try doing

if (isset($_REQUEST['score']) && ($_REQUEST['score'] !== '')) {
 ...
}

The isset will handle the presence/absence of the query parameter, and the strict string (!==) comparison will handle the case where the ‘score’ query is present but has no value. PHP treats all data coming from _GET/_POST/_REQUEST as strings, so this test is 100% reliable.