Many people tend to view these two functions as opposites, causing necessary debugging. This issue frequently occurs when validating forms.

isset()

From the PHP manual:

isset — Determine if a variable is set and is not NULL

In other words, a variable is set if it has been assigned a value other than NULL. If a variable is assigned to be an empty string – it is set. The following code and output should illustrate my point.

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<?php

var_dump(isset($x));

$x = NULL;
var_dump(isset($x));

$x = "";
var_dump(isset($x));

$x = '';
var_dump(isset($x));

?>

empty()

Again from the PHP manual:

empty — Determine whether a variable is empty

In other words, a variable is empty if it is an empty string, 0, “0″, false, NULL, array(), and an unset variable are all empty.

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<?php

var_dump(empty($x));

$x = NULL;
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = "";
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = '';
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = "0";
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = 0;
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = false;
var_dump(empty($x));

$x = array();
var_dump(empty($x));

?>

Now when you are validating forms to make sure a user did not leave a form field blank, it is probably best to use neither empty() or isset() (not that isset would work). Since it is possible your form might accept 0 as a valid answer. Therefore you should just check to make sure it is not an empty string.

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<?php
if($_GET['foo'] == "") {
    echo "You must enter a value for foo!";
}
?>

Tags: empty, isset