How do you set a boolean for whether a record exists in Laravel?

Question

I'm trying to set a boolean $bln according to whether a record exists in a table.

This is what I've been trying:

$bln = (bool) DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->pluck('id');

For some reason $bln always seems to be set to true . What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

To achieve this you can use count() method:

$bln = DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->count() > 0;

If you'll need the object later, load it and use is_null() to do the check:

$object = DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->first();
$bln = !is_null($object);

Answer 2

I'm guessing that id is a integer and not boolean type? Well I really hope it is! hehe.
What you do is fetching the id of a given account and casting it to bool .
If you cast a value to bool , it will be true as long as it does not evaluate to false , in a integers case, only 0 will be evaluated to false when you cast it to bool .

Check if the result count is larger than 0 and it should give the result you want.

Answer 3

Because pluck() return an array, you can check it with count $bln = (bool) count(DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->pluck('id')); Here is a Laravel Documentation: pluck()

Answer 4

Please try this.

$bln = DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->get()->first();
if(isset($bln) && $bln != null || $bln != ''){
    return $bln = 1;
}
else{
    return $bln = 0;
}

Answer 5

The exists() and doesntExist() methods give a boolean straight out of the box, use them instead of count() .

$bln = DB::table('accounts')->where('name', $name)->exists();

Laravel Docs : Determining If Records Exist