Have h2 tag not show up if there are no blog posts

Question

On our current site we have different company profiles. Some companies have blog posts that display on their profile and some don't. Their is an h2 tag above posts that is in the page template then the code to bring in the posts. The code looks like this.

<h2>Recent Blog Articles</a></h2>

then

 echo get_related_author_posts();

I am trying to find a way so that if their are no posts for the company the h2 tag will not show up. The code in the functions file is

function get_related_author_posts() {
    global $authordata, $post;

    $authors_posts = get_posts( array( 'author' => $authordata->ID, 'post__not_in' => array( $post->ID ), 'posts_per_page' => 5 ) );

    $output = ' <ul style="list-style: none;">';
    foreach ( $authors_posts as $authors_post ) {
        $output .= '<li><a href="' . get_permalink( $authors_post->ID ) . '">' . apply_filters( 'the_title', $authors_post->post_title, $authors_post->ID ) . '</a></li>';
    }
    $output .= '</ul>';

    return $output;
}

Answer 1

Put your <h2> tag after the call to get_related_author_posts(). For example...

$rap = get_related_author_posts();

if (!empty($rap)) {
  echo '<h2>Recent Blog Articles</a></h2>'; // <- broken anchor tag !!!
  echo $rap;
  // and so on
}

But you will need to make get_related_author_posts() return false if there are no posts.

function get_related_author_posts() {
    global $authordata, $post;

    $authors_posts = get_posts( array( 'author' => $authordata->ID, 'post__not_in' => array( $post->ID ), 'posts_per_page' => 5 ) );
    if (empty($author_posts)) return false;
    // and the rest of the function