How to detect if a variable is empty in Shortcuts

Shortcuts
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Hi,
I’m trying to identify photos that are not in albums on my phone. It’s easy to get the “Album” property (although it’s contents are weird) but I want to test if the return value is empty. It seems Shortcuts “If” action doesn’t allow for that. Am i missing something obvious?
P.

2

Try to set the if to equals and then leave it empty. That has previously worked for me.

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Here be dragons and debates about emptiness vs. null.

Just a quick note on checking for empty vs. null, they aren’t the same and don’t always give the results you would expect unless think about it carefully.

Here’s a text based example that uses variables and strings of text as that’s conceptually probably the easiest to deal with. It’s based on trying to match a string where no match can be made.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/84dfeb9a49e14b139ab433a0c6dd8d11

Take a look at the three tests for “emptiness”. See if you can figure out why not all of the tests seem to work.

I think you are working with strings from it being an identifier property on a photo, but are you looking to identify a blank string or a string that does not exist (null)?

3 Likes
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Very late reply: turns out the « album » property for photos is not a simple string. It’s an iterable list of strings that you have to unpack. I ended up transforming it into a dictionary before testing for the presence of data.

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I’ve also used counting for 0 items before.