Re: NULLS vs Empty result in PHP

On Sep 23, 2009, at 9:48 AM, Dan Shirah wrote:

From reading the other responses to this thread, it seems that you want to "skip" or "exclude" rows in the results where my_column === null. If this is correct, why not do it in the SELECT statement to begin with? $my_query = "SELECT my_column FROM my_database WHERE my_column IS NOT NULL"; That should do it.

I want to exclude the rows that might be NULL, "" (empty), or

"        "

(empty series of spaces) From all of the input so far, it seems that using trim() on the variable and then use empty() is the best way to pick all three types up.

I don't think you're using mysql, but your selected db may have a similar option. I would do the work in the sql. <?php $sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE TRIM(column) <> '' AND column IS NOT NULL"; $result = query($sql); while ($row = fetch_row ($result)) {

    echo "Not empty, multiple spaces or NULL!";

} ?> So, if you have any extraneous spaces, they will be removed. It also accounts for nulls. No work is required by PHP to determine the values you need. Just use what it returns. This should work. Hope this helps. ~Philip