Question: Can i send text from a php file into a variable in an html file? I have an if statement in my php, that checks if a field is empty. If it is empty then i want to send to my html file a text saying 'please fill the field' and put it in a label in my html. Is there a way for that?

```
<?php 

$name = $_REQUEST['author'];
$from = $_REQUEST['email'];
$subj = $_REQUEST['sub'];
$message = $_REQUEST['msg'];
$subject = $subj;
$body = $message;
$headers .= "From: ".$from;

$to = "mail@mail.com";

if ($name = ''){
     HERE i want to send a text to a variable named 'reason' in my html in case $name is empty.
    }

if(mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers)) {
    header( "Location: http://www.mysite.com/contactForm-english" );
    } else {
echo "There was a problem sending the mail. Check your code and make sure that the e-mail address ".$to." is valid";
}

?>

```

Answer: 
According to <http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#variable-values>, "If the variable-binding element has empty content and has neither a select attribute nor an as attribute, then the supplied value of the variable is a zero-length string.". 

So you need to change that, for instance by doing `<xsl:variable name="patterns" select="()"/>` to bind an empty sequence as the variable value.
**In XSLT 1.0 (the same would work also with XSLT 2.0) use**:

```
<xsl:variable name="patterns" select="/.."/>

```

This provides to the XSLT processor the information, necessary to conclude that the type of the `$patterns` variable is *node-set*.