Better IF ELSE for MySQL INSERT

[luiddog]

I have about thirty of these. I'm using them to INSERT:

if($row_list_new['place2'] > '') {
$place2=$row_list_new['place2'];
}else{
$place2='NULL';
}
if($row_list_new['place3'] > '') {
$place3=$row_list_new['place3'];
}else{
$place3='NULL';
}

Isn't there a much better way?

[Piranha]

I am not 100% sure, but it seems that your database is not normalized. Can you post the design of the table you insert into, the query you use to insert and where you get the values (GET, POST, D😎 to let us help you out better.

[luiddog]

$place3 column is a datetime so if $row_list_new['place2'] is blank it gets inserted as 0000-00-00, not NULL

$place3 column is an int so if $row_list_new['place3'] is blank it gets inserted as 0, not NULL

I ended up writing out all 38 if/else statements and what happens is 'NULL' gets inserted as text, so I switched it to }else{ $place2 = '', and it still inserts a blank character.

So, I switch them all to:
if(!empty($row_list_new['place2'])) {
$place2=$row_list_new['place2'];
}

And still I get 0000-00-00 in the datetime column