count() emitting an E_WARNING

Question

Prior to PHP 7.2 using count() on a scalar value or non-countable object would return 1 or 0.

For example: https://3v4l.org/tGRDE

Answer 1

You can solve it by using "??"-operator. If the left side is null, the right side will be used. So as we have a empty array, our result will be zero.

count(null ?? [])

Another way would be to typecast it as an array.

count((array) null)