[php] How do check if a PHP session is empty?

Is this bad practice?

if ($_SESSION['something'] == '')
{
    echo 'the session is empty';
}

Is there a way to check if its empty or it is not set? I'm actualy doing this:

if (($_SESSION['something'] == '') || (!isset($_SESSION['something'])) {
    echo 'the session is either empty or doesn\'t exist';
}

Does !isset just checks if a $_SESSION[''] exist and doesn't check if, is there are values in the array or not

The best practice is to check if the array key exists using the built-in array_key_exists function.

If you want to check whether sessions are available, you probably want to use the session_id() function:

session_id() returns the session id for the current session or the empty string ("") if there is no current session (no current session id exists).

I know this is old, but I ran into an issue where I was running a function after checking if there was a session. It would throw an error everytime I tried loading the page after logging out, still worked just logged an error page. Make sure you use exit(); if you are running into the same problem.

     function sessionexists(){
        if(!empty($_SESSION)){
     return true;
         }else{
     return false;
         }
      }


        if (!sessionexists()){
           redirect("https://www.yoursite.com/");
           exit();
           }else{call_user_func('check_the_page');
         } 

if(isset($_SESSION))
{}
else
{}

you are looking for PHP’s empty() function

Use isset, empty or array_key_exists (especially for array keys) before accessing a variable whose existence you are not sure of. So change the order in your second example:

if (!isset($_SESSION['something']) || $_SESSION['something'] == '')

You could use the count() function to see how many entries there are in the $_SESSION array. This is not good practice. You should instead set the id of the user (or something similar) to check wheter the session was initialised or not.

if( !isset($_SESSION['uid']) )
    die( "Login required." );

(Assuming you want to check if someone is logged in)