How to Check if a For Loop Is Empty in Django

In this article, we show how to check if a for loop is empty in Django, meaning there are no items for the for loop to iterate through. This is meaning that we variable that the for loop iterates through contains no items.

So, to do many tasks in Django such as list views on web pages for a certain database field, we use for loops in Django to show all elements of a given field of a database table.

But what happens if there are no elements yet in the database table?

How can we check to see if the for loop is empty and if it is empty, run certain code, such as state to the user, ' There are not items yet in this list.'

There are several steps you can do, such as count the number of items in the database table using the count() function and then making an if statement that if the count is equal to 0, then print out the statement, 'There are no items yet in this list.'

However, there is actually a simpler way to do this in Django.

Django has a built in template tag, {% empty %}, placed within the for loop. If the for loop does not have any objects in it, then the code within the {% empty %} template tag is run.

So, to show an actual example, look at the following code below.

{% for item in allitems %} {{item.title}} {% empty %} There are no items in this list {% endfor %}

So, above, is a basic demonstration of the empty template tag in Django.

If there are objects in the for loop (it is not empty), then the title of the items are listed.

If there are no objects in the for loop (meaning the allitems variable is empty), then the empty tag code is run, which in this case prints the statement 'There are no items in this list'.

So this is an easy way to check if a for loop is empty in Django, utilizing the built-in Django template tag, and to execute specific code if the for loop is indeed empty (meaning there are no items for the for loop to iterate through).

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