#coding

PHP: The Right Way

http://www.phptherightway.com/

PHP: The Right Way

There’s a lot of outdated information on the Web that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and insecure code. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP popular coding standards, links to authoritative tutorials around the Web and what the contributors consider to be best practices at the present time.

Quick PHP Tip

If you’re coding in PHP and checking variables to see if they have a strlen() == 0, or isset() or a variety of other possibilities, you might consider using empty() instead. It’s quite versatile and is nice because it doesn’t trigger any warnings or notices if you use it on a variable which hasn’t been set yet. Here are some examples to show you what it will match against:

<?php

$zero_string  = '0';
$zero_int     = 0;
$false        = false;
$empty_string = '';
$array        = array();
$obj          = new stdClass();

echo empty( $zero_string ) ? "'0' = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $zero_int ) ? "0 = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $false ) ? "false = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $empty_string ) ? "'' = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $array ) ? "array() = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $obj ) ? "stdClass() = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $foo ) ? "foo is empty (and the variable was never set)\n" : '';