MySQL weird behavior with null integer - php

Question

So I'm trying to implement php-etl to my application and MySQL doesnt let me insert null to nullable integer but it does if I manually change it, like this:
### This works ###
foreach($data as $row){
if($row["some_integer"] == Null){
$row["some_integer"] = Null;
}
if($row["some_other_integer"] == Null){
$row["some_other_integer"] = Null;
}
MyModel::create($row);
}
### This throws General error: 1366 Incorrect integer value ###
foreach($data as $row){
MyModel::create($row);
}
Tried both manually and with marquine/php-etl package. The input is csv file, null is empty space between ;; separators. Anybody knows what is going on here? Working on laravel 7.
Ok so the package loads the values as empty strings and by setting it Null it becomes real null... Is there a way to quicky convert these values to null?

Answer 1

MySQL won't treat an empty string as null, simply because an empty string and null are two different things. So the message you get from MySQL isn't weird, it's correct.
Nullify all empty strings in an array
If you just want to nullify all empty strings in an array, you can create a simple function for it:
function nullifyEmptyStrings(array $array)
{
return array_map(function ($item) {
return $item !== '' ? $item : null;
}, $array);
}
Then call it where ever/when ever you need it:
$row = nullifyEmptyStrings($row);
or use it directly in the argument for the create function:
MyModel::create(nullifyEmptyStrings($row));
Here's a demo
Nullify specific empty strings in an array
If you want to be able to define which array items to nullify, you can use this function:
function nullifyEmptyArrayValues(array $array, array $keys)
{
foreach ($keys as $key) {
if (array_key_exists($key, $array) && $array[$key] === '') {
$array[$key] = null;
}
}
return $array;
}
And in your code, you first pass the array containing the data and then another array with the keys to nullify, if the values are empty:
$row = nullifyEmptyArrayValues($row, ['some-key', 'another-key']);
Here's a demo