yup, all good now. cheers.
OK I got it.
In version 5.2.5 if there is an ACF field somewhere is the site, EVEN if it doesn’t apply to the page with location rules, it will return that empty string var.
E.g. I had in a template get_field(‘test123’) which returned NULL.
I then created an ACF field called test123 but made the location rules so that it definitely didn’t apply to the page i was testing on.
I refreshed the page and it then returned an empty string var.
Hope this makes sense….
get_field(‘disable_lead_ins_block’) was my field name.
I thought something like that too. However I had a development instance on 5.2.3 that was returning NULL as expected. Did an update of ACF, refreshed the page and got the empty string array back.
This page/post would never have had this field, and had nothing in the wp_postmeta table.
I’m still digging….