PHP: a short cut for isset and !empty?

Question

I wonder if there any better ideas to solve the problem below,

I have a form with a number of input fields, such as,

Answer 1

User-defined function, I 'm afraid. But they come out short enough. I have one lying around somewhere if you want to take a look, but it's really trivial as you can imagine.

Update:

Here's one I found:

define('PARAM_INT', 0);
define('PARAM_STR', 1);

function get_param($name, $default = null, $type = PARAM_INT) {
    $value = $default;

    if (isset($_POST[$name])) {
        $value = $_POST[$name];
    }
    else if (isset($_GET[$name])) {
        $value = $_GET[$name];
    }

    switch($type) {
        case PARAM_INT:
            $value = (int)$value;
            break;
        case PARAM_STR:
            break;
        default:
            // error your heart out here
    }
    return $value;
}

Of course now all the cool kids do it with filter_var, but the idea is the same.