How to handle Undefined Offset in laravel?

Question

I am getting this error when I land on the page after logging in:

ErrorException in compiled.php line 11573: Undefined offset: 0 (View: C:\xampp\htdocs\campusguru\resources\views\home.blade.php)

I know that the cause of this error is the empty variable that I passed to the view.

I have already tried:

if(isset($blog)) { do something } 

and in blade view as:

{{ $blogs[0]->title or '' }} 

Is there anyway I could handle this error. Or is there a better way of doing it?

Answer 1

Try the following:

{{ isset($blogs[0]) ? $blogs[0]->title : '' }} 

If you are using a foreach to get every $blog->title use

@foreach ($blogs as $blog)   {{ $blog->title }} @endforeach 

Answer 2

The problem is that $blogs is actually defined and its value is [] (i.e. empty array) so it means that isset($blogs) statement will evaluate to true. Same thing is valid for collections. If a collection is empty (i.e. has no elements but it's defined) isset($blogs) will still evaluate to true but accessing $blogs[0] will cause an Undefined offset: 0 error.

You could try the following solutions:

Using count

if(count($blogs)) { /* do something */ } 

if $blogs = [] or $blogs = null the function count will return zero so that means that $blogs is empty.

Using empty

if(!empty($blogs)) { /* do something */ } 

This is the equivalent of writing !isset($var) || $var == false as described in the PHP Manual - empty:

Returns FALSE if var exists and has a non-empty, non-zero value. Otherwise returns TRUE.

The following things are considered to be empty:

"" (an empty string)

0 (0 as an integer)

0.0 (0 as a float)

"0" (0 as a string)

NULL

FALSE

array() (an empty array)

$var; (a variable declared, but without a value)

Checking if a collection is empty

If $blogs is a Collection is sufficient to check if it is not empty using `isNotEmpty() method:

@if($blogs->isNotEmpty()) <!-- Do your stuff --> @endif 

EDIT

I forgot to add the blade syntax:

@if(count($blogs)) <!-- Do whatever you like --> @endif 

or

@if(!empty($blogs)) <!-- Do whatever you like --> @endif 

EDIT 2

I'm adding more content to this answer in order to address some of the issues presented in the comments. I think that your problem is the following:

$blogs is an empty collection, so it's defined but it has no elements. For this reason the if(isset($blogs)) statement will evaluate to true passing the first if condition. In your blade template you are making the check {{ $blogs[0]->title or '' }} that is absolutely not equal to <?php isset($blogs[0]->title) ? $blogs[0]->title : '' ?> as pointed out in the comments, but it is an expression that will return true or false, so it will never print out title parameter even if $blogs[0] exists. The problem here is that when checking the condition $blogs[0]->title you are actually accessing the element 0 of the $blogs collection that will trigger the exception Undefined offset: 0 because the collection is actually empty. What i was saying is that in addition to the

if(count($blogs)) { /* do something */ } 

(that checks that $blogs is set and that it's length is greater than 0) in your template you should do

{{ isset($blogs[0]->title) ? $blogs[0]->title : '' }} 

or more concisely

{{ $blogs[0]->title ?: '' }} 

assuming that the control flow will arrive there only if the $blogs passed the first if. If the issue still persists the problem is elsewhere in your code IMHO.