I am starting to really dislike the PHP function isset().� Today, I was working on a registration system in CakePHP and my password validation was not working.� If I left�the password field�blank and clicked submit, it would come back with other errors, but then the password would come back populated with a long string - a hashed version of an empty string!
After some investigation, I discovered that the AuthComponent in CakePHP was doing an isset() check on the username and password fields.� If isset() returned true for both, it would hash the password.
After a quick investigation, it was clear that isset() was returning true when my password field was empty!� The weird part is, I think this is specific to a PHP version.� I'm not 100% positive on this, but at work we develop locally and then commit our work through SVN to our development server.� Up until recently we had a versioning difference, yes I know this is a bad idea, and I'm sure I've seen code using isset() work in one instance and not in the other!
I would love if someone would confirm or deny this fact.
Regardless, this is clearly unacceptable.� My field is empty, isset() should not be returning true.� My solution is to ALWAYS use !empty().� Don't forget the "!" to negate it because empty() returns true when it's empty!
If you read PHP's documentation, there are still a couple of scenarios when using isset() is needed over empty().� The only real scenario that I use it often is that I expect zero (0) as a valid result.� Using !empty(0) will return false, where isset(0) will return true.
Conclusion, save yourself the headaches caused by isset() and use empty() or if you are dealing with arrays, array_key_exists(). Published on Apr 8, 2009 Tags: PHP
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