wp_nav_menu always returns a container

[thememason]

wp_nav_menu('container' => false) is returning an empty div when there is no menu items. This should return either false or an empty string. You can change the div to a different element, but you cannot remove the container.

This makes it difficult to test whether the menu is empty or not. Checking !empty($menu) no longer works like it used to.

[joyously]

Do you have a specific test case?

The code looks to me like having no menu would return false. But having a menu with no items will return some HTML.

Also, there is always the function has_nav_menu() which is a better way to test whether there is a menu or not.

[thememason]

has_nav_menu() is only useful if you do not intend to use the fallback function wp_page_menu called by wp_nav_menu. The problem is that if a website only uses posts and there are no actual pages, it returns an empty <div>.

Right now the only solution I've found is to use strpos to determine if an <li> item exists in what wp_nav_menu returns. This is more of a hack for now. Here's my theme file where you can see the code: ​https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/browser/gavel/1.0.9/header.php

[thememason]

To reproduce the issue:

1. Setup a new WP install
2. Delete all pages
3. Use the following code somewhere in your theme

   wp_nav_menu(array( 
   'theme_location' 	=> 'top', 
   'container' => false
   )); 
   

4. Inspect the results

The empty div appears to be coming from the callback wp_page_menu. The only other solution I found is to use wp_count_posts('page') as well as has_nav_menu. This still seems like a hack, I feel it should return false instead of returning an empty div.