How to show empty data message in Datatables

Later versions of dataTables have the following language settings (taken from here):

• "infoEmpty" - displayed when there are no records in the table
• "zeroRecords" - displayed when there no records matching the filtering

e.g.

$('#example').DataTable( {
    "language": {
        "infoEmpty": "No records available - Got it?",
    }
});

Note: As the property names do not contain any special characters you can remove the quotes:

$('#example').DataTable( {
    language: {
        infoEmpty: "No records available - Got it?",
    }
});

If you want to customize the message that being shown on empty table use this:

$('#example').dataTable( {
    "oLanguage": {
        "sEmptyTable":     "My Custom Message On Empty Table"
    }
} );

Since Datatable 1.10 you can do the following:

$('#example').DataTable( {
    "language": {
        "emptyTable":     "My Custom Message On Empty Table"
    }
} );

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For the complete availble datatables custom messages for the table take a look at the following link reference/option/language

Late to the game, but you can also use a localisation file

DataTable provides a .json localized file, which contains the key sEmptyTable and the corresponding localized message.

For example, just download the localized json file on the above link, then initialize your Datatable like that :

$('#example').dataTable( {
    "language": {
        "url": "path/to/your/json/file.json"
    }
});

IMHO, that's a lot cleaner, because your localized content is located in an external file.

This syntax works for DataTables 1.10.16, I didn't test on previous versions.

I was finding same but lastly i found an answer. I hope this answer help you so much.

when your array is empty then you can send empty array just like

if(!empty($result))
        {
            echo json_encode($result);
        }
        else
        {
            echo json_encode(array('data'=>''));
        }

Thank you