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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T08:13:27+00:00

There is an excellent SO on MySQL empty strings versus NULL here, MySQL, better

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There is an excellent SO on MySQL empty strings versus NULL here, MySQL, better to insert NULL or empty string?, however it doesn’t take in to account ‘uniformity’ – i.e. if you want to have just one choice in your tables (i.e. empty string OR NULL), which should it be?

My question is, can I get MySQL to automatically store empty strings as NULLs?

After reading the previous SO I am generally inclined to store NULL but the problem is that I have a lot of PHP forms with optional fields, and (when left blank) these return empty strings.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can enclose your strings with NULLIF().

    You use it like this:

    NULLIF('test','') --> returns 'test'
NULLIF(''    ,'') --> returns NULL
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