PHP Cookbook

6.9. Returning Failure

Problem

You want to indicate failure from a function.

Solution

Return false:

function lookup($name) {
    if (empty($name)) { return false; }
    ...
}

if (false !== lookup($name)) { /* act upon lookup */ }

Discussion

I n PHP, non-true values aren’t standardized and can easily cause errors. As a result, it’s best if all your functions return the defined false keyword because this works best when checking a logical value.

Other possibilities are '' or 0. However, while all three evaluate to non-true inside an if, there’s actually a difference among them. Also, sometimes a return value of 0 is a meaningful result, but you still want to be able to also return failure.

For example, strpos( ) returns the location of the first substring within a string. If the substring isn’t found, strpos( ) returns false. If it is found, it returns an integer with the position. Therefore, to find a substring position, you might write:

if (strpos($string, $substring)) { /* found it! */ }

However, if $substring is found at the exact start of $string, the value returned is 0. Unfortunately, inside the if, this evaluates to false, so the conditional is not executed. Here’s the correct way to handle the return value of strpos( ):

if (false !== strpos($string, $substring)) { /* found it! */ }

Also, false is always guaranteed to be false — in the current version of PHP and forever more. Other values may not guarantee this. For example, in PHP 3, empty('0') was true, but it changed to false