cleanest way to skip a foreach if array is empty

php coding-style
Keyo picture Keyo · Aug 10, 2010 · Viewed 138.6k times · Source

Not a major problem but I was wondering if there is a cleaner way to do this. It would be good to avoid nesting my code with an unnecessary if statement. If $items is empty php throws an error.

$items = array('a','b','c');

if(!empty($items)) { // <-Remove this if statement
  foreach($items as $item) {
    print $item;
  }
}

I could probably just use the '@' error suppressor, but that would be a bit hacky.

Answer

Christian picture Christian · Aug 10, 2010

There are a million ways to do this.

The first one would be to go ahead and run the array through foreach anyway, assuming you do have an array.

In other cases this is what you might need:

foreach ((array) $items as $item) {
    print $item;
}

Note: to all the people complaining about typecast, please note that the OP asked cleanest way to skip a foreach if array is empty

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