Question

players will either be empty or a comma separated list (or a single value). What is the easiest way to check if it’s empty? I’m assuming I can do so as soon as I fetch the $gameresult array into $gamerow? In this case it would probably be more efficient to skip exploding the $playerlist if it’s empty, but for the sake of argument, how would I check if an array is empty as well?

$gamerow = mysql_fetch_array($gameresult);
$playerlist = explode(",", $gamerow['players']);

Answer 1

If you just need to check if there are ANY elements in the array, you can use either the array itself, due to PHP’s loose typing, or – if you prefer a stricter approach – use count():

if (!$playerlist) {
     // list is empty.
}
if (count($playerlist) === 0) {
     // list is empty.
}

If you need to clean out empty values before checking (generally done to prevent explodeing weird strings):

foreach ($playerlist as $key => $value) {
    if (!strlen($value)) {
       unset($playerlist[$key]);
    }
}
if (!$playerlist) {
   //empty array
}