It sounds simple, but I'm having some real issues detecting if a field is empty (has no content) I have two fields : summary - textarea summary_de - textarea I want to detect if $summary_de is empty if its empty show $summary if $summary is empty show nothing I have tried the following tests : // Test A if ($page->summary_de) { echo "Test A : True"; } else { echo "Test A : False"; } echo "<hr />"; // Test B if (empty($page->summary_de)) { echo "Test B : True