Question

What am I doing wrong here? I’m simply retrieving results from a table and then adding them to an array. Everything works as expected until I check for an empty result…

This gets the match, adds it to my array and echoes the result as expected:

$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('now'));

$sth = $db->prepare("SELECT id_email FROM db WHERE hardcopy = '1' AND hardcopy_date <= :today AND hardcopy_sent = '0' ORDER BY id_email ASC");

$sth->bindParam(':today', $today, PDO::PARAM_STR);

if(!$sth->execute()) {
    $db = null;
    exit();
}

while ($row = $sth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
    $this->id_email[] = $row['id_email'];
    echo $row['id_email'];
}

$db = null;
return true;

When I try to check for an empty result, my code returns ’empty’, but no longer yields the matching result:

$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('now'));

$sth = $db->prepare("SELECT id_email FROM db WHERE hardcopy = '1' AND hardcopy_date <= :today AND hardcopy_sent = '0' ORDER BY id_email ASC");

$sth->bindParam(':today',$today, PDO::PARAM_STR);

if(!$sth->execute()) {
    $db = null;
    exit();
}

if ($sth->fetchColumn()) {
    echo 'not empty';
    while ($row = $sth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
        $this->id_email[] = $row['id_email'];
        echo $row['id_email'];
    }
    $db = null;
    return true;
}
echo 'empty';
$db = null;
return false;

Answer 1

You’re throwing away a result row when you do $sth->fetchColumn(). That’s not how you check if there are any results. You do

if ($sth->rowCount() > 0) {
  ... got results ...
} else {
   echo 'nothing';
}

Relevant documentation is here: PDOStatement::rowCount