This entire post is dedicated to using the wrong tool for the job…
Use isset if you want to see if the variable is set, you should never be casting client input unless it’s coming from query params (or form post I guess but at that point use JSON).
“empty” is a useful tool, provided you take into account things like “is this allowed to be 0/empty-string/etc”.
Lastly:
> After a lengthy debugging session, we realized that empty() was treating 0 as "empty", causing our validation to fail unexpectedly.
Lengthy? To notice an empty check failing? Look, the codebase I work on has its warts, all older codebases do, but unless you have no XDebug, forgot how to log to file or echo to the client, and/or aren’t capable of searching a codebase for the error you got and tracing it back from there then I can’t believe that would be a “Lengthy” process to track down. Even if you are returning a generic error to the client, surely you are logging the real error to a log somewhere?
Use isset if you want to see if the variable is set, you should never be casting client input unless it’s coming from query params (or form post I guess but at that point use JSON).
“empty” is a useful tool, provided you take into account things like “is this allowed to be 0/empty-string/etc”.
Lastly:
> After a lengthy debugging session, we realized that empty() was treating 0 as "empty", causing our validation to fail unexpectedly.
Lengthy? To notice an empty check failing? Look, the codebase I work on has its warts, all older codebases do, but unless you have no XDebug, forgot how to log to file or echo to the client, and/or aren’t capable of searching a codebase for the error you got and tracing it back from there then I can’t believe that would be a “Lengthy” process to track down. Even if you are returning a generic error to the client, surely you are logging the real error to a log somewhere?