Fixed by Zeev

This Behaviour still persists in PHP 5.6 on Centos7

I am running constantly into the same problem:

The Documentation states on 
http://php.net/manual/en/function.empty.php
The Function empty() would trigger on Values like
0 (0 as an integer)
0.0 (0 as a float)
"0" (0 as a string)
as empty($var) === true

But I found in many cases a String containing a "0" is not empty. It contains a Character that is "0".
If I store the Character "0" into a file the file is not empty anymore it contains the text "0".
For example:
$ echo "0" > myfile.txt

On Integers the Value 0 can be a valid number according to the Programming Logic as an Index of an Array for example.
The same goes for Float Numbers.

I found discarding those Values as "empty" is an Error in most cases of a complex Application.

Test script: 
This Script might be simple but it leads to silent Application Errors that are hard to track down.
https://pastebin.com/gjJwHe4T

Actual result:
The Script will print only:
'1' => '2'
The other 2 Entries are silently rejected because of the Values "0".

Expected result:
The Script should print out:
'0' => '1'
'1' => '2'
'3' => '0'
On Strings only Values of NULL or "" should trigger empty($var) === true
On Integers only Values of NULL should trigger empty($var) === true
On Float Numbers only Values of NULL should trigger empty($var) === true

I found by the Years the PHP Programmer Community has come about with different workaround for this issue:

if(strlen($string) > 0)
  echo "string is empty\n";

but for text with non latin characters you need the mb_strlen() Function to savely check the string.

if(mb_strlen($string) > 0)
  echo "string is empty\n";

Then I also found other solutions like

if(isset($string) && $string !== "")
  echo "string is empty\n";

if(is_numeric($string) || isset($string[0]))
  echo "string is empty\n";

I found that (NULL !== "") would result as "true"
so I needed to add isset() to the check.

Then if the variable would be a Number like $string = 5 
the Check (isset($string[0])) would result as "false" because this Check does not work for numbers
so I needed to add is_numeric($string) to the check.

But adding all those additional checks to get the right Behaviour results in performance drop downs.

So that I finally got the right result with an acceptable performance with the Check

if(isset($string) && $string !== "")
  echo "string is empty\n";

yeah because '0' is *not* empty when it is a string '' would be empty

hence you should cast expected integers with (int)$var and also consider the scalar type hints and return types introduced in PHP7

I have to correct my little snippet:

"
if(isset($string) && $string !== "")
  echo "string is not empty\n";
"

@hugo, a 19 year old bug report against a version of PHP that nobody even thinks about anymore is hardly the appropriate place for this.
0, "0", and 0.0 are empty() and that will not change anytime soon.