Question

I’m building an array to determine if I need to take an action. I am executing a query. The table has a sent_date field to determine if an email has been sent to a user or not. Once it has been sent to a user, that sent_date field is populated with getdate(). Here is how I’m building:

$sent_date_sql = "
    select ind_id, sent_date from profileemail
";

$results = dbExec($sent_date_sql);

I then build my array:

foreach ($results as $r){
    array_push($sent_date,$r['sent_date']);
    $query_count = count($results);
}

This all is working gloriously. My issue is when I go to check the sent_date array. The first time in the month that this script runs, ALL sent_date values are NULL. So my array looks like:

array(228) {
  [0]=>
  NULL
  [1]=>
  NULL
  [2]=>
  NULL
  [3]=>
  NULL
  [4]=>
  NULL

…etc.

Now I am going to try to evaluate $sent_date:

if(empty($sent_date)){

My empty condition never hits because the values of the array are all NULL. Is there an alternative way to achieve what I am trying to do? Should I be looping through my $sent_date array and evaluating each value?

Answer 1

if (!array_filter($sent_date))

array_filter removes all “empty” elements from the array. If all elements in the array are “empty”, the result is an array with no elements (array()). An empty array evaluates to false.