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PHP empty() and the trouble of passing new zero values in forms

Lets say we have a form. The form is straight-forward: HTML radio buttons that posts to a PHP processing script that saves the results to a database. The radio buttons correspond to bindary responses to questions - Yes/No, True/False. These truth values are mapped to the integers '1' and '0', which are then stored in the database. When such a form is creating new records, this is about as brainless as web-development gets. But things get more complicated when the form is used to update existing records. A useful update form will typically have a few basic features; among them, the option to update all of the data in the form or just some of the data. To do this, we have to check whether a variable is being updated or not. One approach to checking on variable updates is to create an array with all of the variables to be considered, like this:  $stuff = array( 'fee' => $_POST['fee'], 'fi' => $_POST['fi'], ...