Displaying error instead of null values in PHP

Question

Hi,

I am building up a site in PHP which takes input of more than 20 fields from user. Hardly 3-4 field values are compulsory, rest can be left blank. I want to display a custom error message instead of blank or zero or null while displaying these values. How can this be done? I am using MySQL as backend.

Answer 1

<?php

$var1 = 'Foo';
$var2 = '';
$var3 = NULL;

echo ( ! empty($var1)) ? $var1 : 'Not set!'; // Foo
echo ( ! empty($var2)) ? $var2 : 'Not set!'; // Not set!
echo ( ! empty($var3)) ? $var3 : 'Not set!'; // Not set!

/**
 * Alternative function solution based on OP's comment:
 */

function output($str)
{
    echo ( ! empty($str)) ? $str : 'Not set!';
    return TRUE;
}

output($var1); // Foo
output($var2); // Not set!
output($var3); // Not set!

Answer 2

I assume you use the $_POST array.

In that case you could just do:

$errors = array();
foreach($_POST AS $key => $value) {
    if(empty($value)) {
        $_POST[$key] = "Custom error message"; // Or place it in an apart array like:
        $errors[$key] = "Custom error message";
    }
}

You can also choose to print the message to the screen immediately. That's up to you.

Besides, did you ever consider a Validation library like:

http://kohanaframework.org/guide/security.validation

Good luck!