cleanest way to skip a foreach if array is empty

Question

Not a major problem but I was wondering if there is a cleaner way to do this  It would be good to avoid nesting my code with an unnecessary if statement  If  items is empty php throws an error    items   array  a   b   c     if  empty  items         lt -Remove this if statement   foreach  items as  item        print  item          I could probably just use the     error suppressor  but that would be a bit hacky

User · Answer

I think the best approach here is to plan your code so that $items is always an array. The easiest solution is to initialize it at the top of your code with $items=array(). This way it will represent empty array even if you don't assign any value to it.

All other solutions are quite dirty hacks to me.

User · Answer

foreach  array  items as  item

User · Answer

The best way is to initialize every bloody variable before use  It will not only solve this silly  problem  but also save you a ton of real headaches   So  introducing  items as  items   array    is what you really wanted

User · Answer

Ternary logic gets it down to one line with no errors   This solves the issue of improperly cast variables and undefined variables   foreach  is array  Items     is object  Items     Items   array    as  Item      It is a bit of a pain to write  but is the safest way to handle it

User · Answer

I wouldn t recommend suppressing the warning output  I would  however  recommend using is array instead of  empty  If  items happens to be a nonzero scalar  then the foreach will still error out if you use  empty

User · Answer

There are a million ways to do this   The first one would be to go ahead and run the array through foreach anyway  assuming you do have an array   In other cases this is what you might need   foreach   array   items as  item        print  item      Note  to all the people complaining about typecast  please note that the OP asked cleanest way to skip a foreach if array is empty  emphasis is mine   A value of true  false  numbers or strings is not considered empty  In addition  this would work with objects implementing  Traversable  whereas is array wouldn t work

User · Answer

Best practice is to define variable as an array at the very top of your code   foreach  array  myArr as  oneItem          will also work but you will duplicate this  array  conversion everytime you need to loop through the array   since it s important not to duplicate even a word of your code  you do better to define it as an empty array at top

User · Answer

You can check whether  items is actually an array and whether it contains any items   if is array  items   amp  amp  count  items   gt  0        foreach  items as  item

User · Answer

items   array  a   b   c     if is array  items       foreach  items as  item        print  item

User · Answer

If variable you need could be boolean false - eg  when no records are returned from database or array - when records are returned  you can do following   foreach    result    result   array    as  item      echo  item    Approach with cast  Array  result  produces an array of count 1 when variable is boolean false which isn t what you probably want

User · Answer

i ve got the following function in my  standard library       Convert argument to an array  function a  a   null        if is null  a           return array        if is array  a           return  a      if is object  a           return  array   a      return      func get args        Basically  this does nothing with arrays objects and convert other types to arrays  This is extremely handy to use with foreach statements and array functions    foreach a  whatever  as  item          foo   array map a  array or string         etc

[php] cleanest way to skip a foreach if array is empty

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