Eloquent casts to array return an empty array by default

[alexdover]

I've just been using the casts feature to cast a text field to an array, very helpful.

However, when the text field is empty the default return value is null. At present the default behaviour is to return the result of json_decode. I would propose an extra check here for the result and return an empty array instead.

This would then avoid having to check if the attribute is an array prior to handling as such.

For example

if (in_array(1, $my_model->options) {
    // ...
}

rather than

if (is_array($my_model->options) && in_array(1, $my_model->options) {
    // ...
}

I'd be happy to put this change together as a pull request but wanted to see if anyone had any reasons why this shouldn't be the default behaviour?

[andrey-helldar]

@alexdover, if I understand your problem correctly, the changes proposed in laravel/framework#30958 will make it easy to solve.

[mfn]

Laravel 7 provided custom casts https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/eloquent-mutators#custom-casts so you can make any behavior you want now.