I wanted to bring to your attention a peculiar behavior in PHP that might catch some of us off guard, particularly when dealing with string manipulation.
When using the trim() function in PHP with a variable assigned as null, the result might not be what you expect. Instead of returning null, trim() will actually return an empty string "".
Here's a quick example to illustrate:
$txt = null;
var_dump($txt); // Outputs: NULL
$txt = trim($txt);
echo "<br>";
var_dump($txt); // Outputs: string(0) ""
As you can see, even though the initial value of $txt is null, after applying trim(), it becomes an empty string "".
This behavior might seem counterintuitive at first, so it's important to keep it in mind, especially when handling user input or dealing with data that might contain null values.
Understanding these nuances can save us from unexpected bugs and make our code more robust.