php is null when empty? [duplicate]

Question

What you're looking for is:

if($variable === NULL) {...}

Note the ===.
When use ==, as you did, PHP treats NULL, false, 0, the empty string, and empty arrays as equal.

As is shown in the following table, empty($foo) is equivalent to $foo==null and is_null($foo) has the same function of $foo===null. The table also shows some tricky values regarding the null comparison. (ϕ denotes an uninitialized variables. )

         empty    is_null 
         ==null  ===null  isset   array_key_exists
      ϕ |   T   |   T   |   F   |   F   
   null |   T   |   T   |   F   |   T   
     "" |   T   |   F   |   T   |   T   
     [] |   T   |   F   |   T   |   T
      0 |   T   |   F   |   T   |   T      
  false |   T   |   F   |   T   |   T   
   true |   F   |   F   |   T   |   T   
      1 |   F   |   F   |   T   |   T   
     \0 |   F   |   F   |   T   |   T   

check == vs ===

'' == NULL would return true
0 == NULL would return true
false == null would return true

where as

'' === NULL would return false
0 === NULL would return false
false === NULL would return false

No it's not a bug. Have a look at the Loose comparisons with == table (second table), which shows the result of comparing each value in the first column with the values in the other columns:

    TRUE    FALSE   1       0       -1      "1"     "0"     "-1"    NULL    array() "php"   ""

    [...]    

""  FALSE   TRUE    FALSE   TRUE    FALSE   FALSE   FALSE   FALSE   TRUE    FALSE   FALSE   TRUE

There you can see that an empty string "" compared with false, 0, NULL or "" will yield true.

You might want to use is_null ^[docs] instead, or strict comparison (third table).

This is not a bug but PHP normal behavior. It happens because the == operator in PHP doesn't check for type.

'' == null == 0 == false

If you want also to check if the values have the same type, use === instead. To study in deep this difference, please read the official documentation.