Debugging ‘Object of class WP_Query could not be converted to int’ error

I am seeing the PHP notice error;

Notice: Object of class WP_Query could not be converted to int in G:\.....\property-search-form.php on line 350

At that line I have a meta query that create a new WP_Query set of results using the code;

$results = new WP_Query( $args );

if(($results == 0) || ($results == false) || ($results == NULL) || !is_object($results) || !($results->have_posts())) {
    return $results;
    }
else {
    return $results;
    }

I understand that the final $result is a number, when I ran it with 9 matching results and used print_r to display the results it returns 9, so not sure what this error means, and how to resolve it.

The issue if that your conditional is trying to convert an Object into things that it cannot be converted to. WP_Query returns a WP_Query Object so when it’s tested against Object == 0 – it tries to convert the object into a number during the comparison but cannot.

You instead need to test against $results->have_posts() or one of it’s properties such as 0 === $results->found_posts