Posted by "Richard Lynch" on 10/31/05 19:59

On Mon, October 31, 2005 10:33 am, Marcus Bointon wrote:
> On 31 Oct 2005, at 14:54, Chris Shiflett wrote:
>
>> Hopefully it is also clear that your argument revolves around the
>> idea that PHP would create $_POST['foo'] as NULL if the checkbox is
>> not checked. This is wrong for two reasons:
>
> No, no, that's not what I said - I wouldn't contemplate such
> silliness! The thing I was wrong on is that PHP converts unset
> parameters (as opposed to nonexistent ones which it obviously can't
> do anything about) to an empty string, e.g. given ?a=&b=1, $_REQUEST
> ['a'] is "", not NULL. However, it still serves to underline my other
> point that using isset without actually knowing that is a potentially
> dangerous thing. Getting into the habit of using it for looking in
> the likes of $_REQUEST means you're likely to use it other places
> where you have no such guarantee, and you'll have a bug to track
> down. Using array_key_exists means you will never be exposed to this
> possibility, no matter where your data comes from.

Once again:

HTTP and HTML have no NULL.

It would be INSANE for PHP to interpret any HTTP data, which, by
definition, is all TEXT as NULL.

In the better part of a decade, I've never had a bug from using
isset() and having NULL as a value in an array. I'm not really
concerned about it happening tomorrow.

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