PHP—Empty String Help

The CMS I'm using has a plugin that pulls a series of pages based on how you've tagged those pages. Everything is working fine, but I need to display the number of pages returned after a user sends a query.

The variable that the number of records is st开发者_Go百科ored in is a string. The small script I'm writing tries to check if this string is blank, and if so echo nothing, but if it's not blank echo the number of pages returned.

<?php

if ($count !== ''){
    echo "text";
}

?>

However, whenever it's passed when the string is supposed to be empty it treats it as if it is not. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or what the string contains that it's not empty.

I found a resource about converting strings to integers but it set it to 0. Thanks for any help.

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$count will never be equal to ' ' if you trim it before.

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It cannot be equal to ' ' after trim, you should check if it is equal to an empty string and not a string with a white space. (trim deletes white spaces)

trim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning and end of a string http://php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php

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trim removes all spaces, so $count == ' ' will always be false if you trimmed first. The easiest change to your code would be to replace the ' ' with ''. Or you could just do this: echo trim($count) === '' ? '' : "text";

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trim() is going to remove all white-space characters from the beginning and end of the string. Unless there is content in the middle, you'll likely end up with a completely empty string. If you're testing for this, try checking empty() or is_null().

if (empty($string)) {
  echo "String is empty.";
}

I find it's better using built-in functions instead of hard-coding a =='' comparison.

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Use var_dump() to check the type and the content of the variable. Check the manual

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Your code seems wrong; you've got "!==", where I'd swear you need to have "!=" (only one equals sign). I'm not sure what "!==" would evaluate to, but I'd bet it's not what you want.

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It seems from the comments that your "blank" string is not blank, but instead has something odd in it. Assuming that it's not too odd I'd just try this:

$count = intval($count);
if ($count) {
  echo 'text';
}

Though this assumes that the $count actually looks like a number to intval when it's got a number in it -- we may need to take a look at this "string" you're getting back in more detail to figure out what's really in it.

Hopefully you've already taken the advice given by others and looked at the resulting page source after doing a var_dump() -- otherwise I'd guess that $count has XML in it, or something else that won't render well if you dump it to an HTML page and view the page rather than the source...

If nothing else, you could really try brute-forcing it:

$count = intval(preg_replace('/[^\d]/', '', $count));
if ($count) {
  echo 'text';
}

...but really it'd be better to work out what this odd plug-in is giving you, and why. Which CMS and plugin is it? Are there some docs available for this thing that's returning $count to you? Do you have the plugin source?