Question

I’m getting data from a MySQL database and trying to check if the column has data in it or not. Here’s what one of the array elements looks like:

[2] => Array 
(   
        [p_name] => This is text
)

Now I have the following statement:

if($products[2]['p_name'] == 0)
      echo '$products[2][\'p_name\'] == 0';

The output is:

"$products[2]['p_name'] == 0"

Now, is it just me, or is that not make any sense whatsoever?

Answer 1

A textual string casted to a number is always 0: (int) 'This is Text' is equal to 0.

You could just use the empty() function or is_numeric() and then your code:

if (empty($var))

(which check if $var is either "" (an empty string), 0 (0 as an integer), 0.0 (0 as a float), "0" (0 as a string), NULL, FALSE or array()).

or

if (is_numeric($var) && $var === 0))