Why would this PHP If statement fail?

[eluser]iamzvonko[/eluser]
I'm stumped on this.

In a view, I have this if statement and I've verified that the $site_list variable is an array and has 3 entries in it. If I put "isset($site_list)" in Eclipse's Expressions pane during debugging it evaluates to true. "!empty($site_list)" also evaluates to true.

So I don't understand why it does not take the "if" path in the code below but goes to the else branch instead.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Code:

if(isset($site_list) && !empty($site_list)) {
...some statements to echo the content to html table rows
} else {
echo 'No Site table records found!';
}