$thing = 10 if(thing>1) { blabla BUT what do we do with normal text? let's say $thing = 'i'm wathing you'; I usually use if($thing) { blabla but if the $thing is just a empty space it will still {, but it shouldn't.. I mean is there anything else I can use for text and if the variable is just a blank space, it should not work? So if $thing contains any characters other than whitespaces {...
I see that you have troubles with if statement. Dont mind there is one of the most simple commands in PHP. For your problem I think that !($thing) or isset() could help. Check Compare Alpha - Numeric Values With PHP and php.net for if statement here. Hope that helps