I am using Laravel on my backend. I am gathering data from my db and then display a string based on if the field is empty or not. I am using Jquery on my front end. After hours of hacking around I found a solution that works, but I am think there has to be a better way. Here is a snippet of my back end code.

    if(Auth::check()) {         $  user = User::find(Auth::user()->id);          $  data['fname'] = $  user->fname;         if (empty($  data['fname'])) {             $  data['fname'] = "__empty";         }     }      return view('pages.index', $  data);  

and here is the code on the front end

checkProfileImprovment();         function checkProfileImprovment(){             @if (Auth::check())                 fname = "{{$  fname}}"                   if(fname != '__empty'){                     $  ('#profile-improvement-header').hide();                 }                 else{                     $  ('#profile-improvement-header').show();                 }              @endif         }