PHP and undefined variables strategy

Question

I am a C++ programmer starting with PHP. I find that I lose most of the debugging time (and my selfesteem!) due to undefined variables. From what I know, the only way to dea

Answer 1

Personally, I try and set variables, even if it's with an empty string, array, Boolean, etc. Then I use a function such as isset() before using them. For example:

$page_found = false;

if ($page_found==false) {
    // Do page not found stuff here
}

if (isset($_POST['field'])) {
    $value = $_POST['field'];
    $sql = "UPDATE table SET field = '$value'";
}

And so on. And before some smart-ass says it: I know that query's unsafe. It was just an example of using isset().