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Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:59:28 +0000
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To: Lynn <kjarli@gmail.com>
Cc: Marcos Marcolin <marcolindev@gmail.com>, internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000002141ef0608f12011"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] New RFC : empty() function
From: fenniclog@gmail.com (tag Knife)

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>
> This is exactly where the problem lies. Is a string with just whitespace
> empty? Why would an ArrayObject with count 0 not be considered to be empty
> while an array with count 0 is? "empty" is subjective and therefore not a
> reliable function to use. Especially in legacy code I find that people use
> `empty` where they should've been using `count() === 0` and have resulted
> in bugs that weren't discovered until months or years later. The variations
> of `$a === ''`, `count($a) === 0`, `! isset($a)`, and `$a === null` already
> check all the scenarios you need, without risking funky bugs due to how the
> internal check for "falsy" values works.
>

trust me, Ive worked on some terrible code bases that do
exactly that and have variables redefined or dynamically assigned
and you have to really check if it has been assigned a value or
not and what value.

It might be forgotten by everyone because of how far PHP has come
but there is still extensive use of the @ suppressor and the
alternative to empty would be

if (@$var == "" || @$var == null || @$var == [] || count(@$var) == 0){}


empty() is 1 of 3 functions i believe that does not throw an undefined
variable warning if you don't @ suppress the variable you are passing in.

So if you want to get rid of empty, can we reignite the talks to finally
get rid of @

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