PHP PDO mySQL return null - php

Question

The following code returns me people with similar telephone numbers. It works perfectly but when there are no numbers the function still returns information meaning that I cannot check hide a certain box if there are no other people with similar numbers.
THE FUNCTION
function getothers($tid,$criteria,$telephone,$telephone2,$elector){
global $dbh;
$tid = '-TID'.$tid;
$sql = "SELECT * FROM electors WHERE ((telephone > 0 AND telephone IN ('$telephone','$telephone2')) OR (telephone2 > 0 AND telephone2 IN ('$telephone','$telephone2'))) $criteria AND records NOT RLIKE '$tid' AND ID != '$elector' LIMIT 10";
$result = $dbh->query($sql);
return $result;
}
THE CALL
<?php $others = getothers($post['TID'],$post['criteria'],$elector['telephone'],$elector['telephone2'],$elector['ID']); ?>
THE LINE THAT DOES NOT WORK
<?php if(!$others){?>
$others still has something in it despite no results. I think I might be missing a line in y PDO. Any ideas?
The print_r
PDOStatement Object ( [queryString] => SELECT * FROM electors WHERE ((telephone > 0 AND telephone IN ('02085414023 ','')) OR (telephone2 > 0 AND telephone2 IN ('02085414023 ',''))) AND (this_vi_street = '' AND this_vi_telephone = '') AND (mosaic IN ('A01','A02','A03','A04','A05','A07','B11','C15','C16','C17','C18','H46','J52','K57','K58','K60') OR last_vi IN ('C','P')) AND postal_vote != 1 AND records NOT RLIKE '-TID1' AND ID != '13' LIMIT 10 )

Answer 1

As per the comments, a version using prepared statements:
function getothers($tid, $criteria, $telephone, $telephone2, $elector) {
global $dbh;
$stmt = $dbh->prepare("SELECT *
FROM electors
WHERE ((telephone > 0 AND telephone IN (:telephone, :telephone2))
OR (telephone2 > 0 AND telephone2 IN (:telephone, :telephone2)))
$criteria
AND records NOT RLIKE :tid
AND ID != :elector
LIMIT 10";
$stmt->execute(array(
':telephone' => $telephone,
':telephone2' => $telephone2,
':tid' => '-TID' . $tid,
':elector' => $elector
));
return $stmt->fetchAll();
}
There are still some bad points in this code:
Uses global to get the DB connection, this is overall bad application structure. You should probably use a class or pass $dbh as a regular argument into the function.
Concatenates $criteria into the prepared statement. Do you really need such dynamic conditions that you can't prepare a query for it without concatenating whole SQL blocks into it?
Doesn't necessarily address your actual problem of function returns.

Answer 2

Maybe do something like
$result = $dbh->query($sql);
if($result->rowCount()>0)
{
return $result;
}
return false;