Handling empty lists in PHP SOAP - php

Question

Initially if there was one item in the list it would return an object rather than an array of one object. I fixed that using:
https://eirikhoem.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/array-problems-with-soap-and-php-updated/
$x = new SoapClient($wsdl, array('features' => SOAP_SINGLE_ELEMENT_ARRAYS));
But I'm having problems when there is no items in the list.
The best I've come up with so far is:
$occulist = $result->GetWebOccurrencesResult->OccuList;
if (!empty((array)($occulist))) {
foreach($occulist->TOccu as $occurrence) {
echo $occurrence->Prog_Name . ' running from ' . $occurrence->StartDate . ' to ' . $occurrence->EndDate . '<br/>';
}
}
Originally it was
foreach($result->GetWebOccurrencesResult->OccuList->TOccu as $occurrence) {

Answer 1

I don't understand exactly what you're trying to achieve here, so if you can clarify in the comments, that'd be great.
What I'm taking from your question is that you want to handle when the array is empty, but want a clean method to do so? The loop you have there would do what you require, but here is another alternative:
do {
foreach($occulist->TOccu as $occurrence) {
echo $occurrence->Prog_Name . ' running from ' . $occurrence->StartDate . ' to ' . $occurrence->EndDate . '<br/>';
}
} while(empty((array)($occulist)) !== FALSE);
So you're looping through the foreach while the $occulist array isn't empty.
You could even do:
while((array)$occulist !== FALSE) {
foreach(....) {
...
}
}

Answer 2

On my server with Windows and PHP 5.4.23 this:
if (!empty((array)($occulist))) {
gives the following error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '(array)' (array) (T_ARRAY_CAST)
I fixed it using:
if (get_object_vars($occulist)) {
I think that is a more elegant alternative to the original...