Why does empty returns false?

[totoff]

hello forum,

i assume i'm overlooking something very obvious, but can't get it. i try to output markup depending on whether a page has been checked as "featured" or not:

<?php $featurednews = $pages->find("featured=1, template=gmk-news, limit=2, sort=-date"); ?>
<?php if (!empty($featurednews)): ?>
output my markup ...
<?php endif; ?>

this outputs my markup even if no page exists with featured=1 (checkbox checked). in other words it returns !empty = true or empty = false although the array must be empty.

sorry if this is a dumb question, still newbie with php ...

thanks for your help.

[nik]

Hi totoff,

empty() doesn't tell you anything useful for objects, returning always false even for objects with no properties at all (as of PHP 5.0.0). See http://php.net/manual/en/function.empty.php for more details.

$pages->find() always returns a PageArray, which is an object although it behaves very much like a plain PHP array. To see if any items were found, you can use count() method like this:

if($featurednews->count() > 0) {
 // ...
}

Using a PHP function - count($featurednews) - would work just as well.

[totoff]

thank you nik, very helpful indeed.