isset() is a great additional tool and has most of the same properties of empty(), except it deals explicitly with null. Most importantly it doesn't produce exceptions, errors, warnings or notices when keys are missing or you attempt to de-reference null.
isset($var) will return false if you have deliberately set $var === NULL
Otherwise more or less fine?
The whole OP here is a longwinded way of observing that several built-in PHP functions don't know anything about types. You can't use switch() as it's usually documented either, for example, because that ignores types too.
There are ways around all these things, of course. PHP that doesn't suck is kind of the norm these days. Just stay the hell away from Wordpress
How can WordPress be so prominent and have so much money behind it and still have such garbage code? Are there giant companies still running PHP 4 server farms that need it to continue to be coded to 2003 standards? Is it some government op to ensure a good deal of the sites on the web are easily-hackable? Someone explain this to me.
This should be a lesson for everyone. Code quality doesn't matter, language doesn't matter, it only matters if people want your product. If you would look at the code quality of the most successful WordPress plugins you would be... uh, amazed? Compared to them WordPress' code quality is top notch. Yet, they probably bring in million/month from subscriptions. If you're curious see WpAllImport
Thankfully it's been a couple years since I had to touch a WordPress code base, but I remember being confused because I needed to define a route and couldn't figure out how to do so either in the code base or in documentation scattered about online. Eventually I realized that this was because WORDPRESS DOESN'T HAVE A ROUTER and you're supposed to just create .php files which are called and executed directly from the web server. True caveman smash-together-rocks shit.
This is not true. WordPress routes request in its own, admittedly shitty way, but it has a router. I don't remember where it is, but it exists. It parses rewrite rules and matches them against the request URI.
