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PHP

Posted by Welby Obeng
Welby Obeng
20,340 Points

how come there is a null in array var_dump?

Take the look at the code below. If I comment out setMessage('test');and setMessage('test2'); var_dump returns false. Which makes sense. When I uncomment setMessage('test'); and setMessage('test2'); it returns :

test test2 NULL

Where did the null come from?

<?php

$error_messages = array();


function setMessage($message) {

        global $error_messages;
        $error_messages [] = $message;
    }



function getMessage() {

        global $error_messages;

        if (empty($error_messages)) {
        return false;
        } else {

        foreach ($error_messages as $message) {

        echo '<div class="notify notify-red"><span class="symbol icon-error"></span>'.' '.$message.'</div>'; 

    }
    }
}   
setMessage('test');
setMessage('test2');
var_dump(getMessage());

1 Answer

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi Welby,

If your array is not empty then your getMessage function does not have an explicit return statement which means it will return the value NULL

Presumably you would want to return true at the end of this function to indicate that you had some messages as opposed to returning false when you don't have any.

Then your output could be:

test
test2
bool(true)
Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

I looked at the question title again and realized I should clarify that you're not doing a var_dump of the array. You're doing a var_dump of the return value of that function.

This is either going to be bool(false) or NULL depending on whether you had messages or not.

The output that you're seeing is the html output for "test" and "test2" from the echo statement and then the var_dump of the return value from that function.