Remove Blank Entries From An Array With PHP

2nd June 2008 - 2 minutes read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and I will endeavour to correct.

If you have an array that you want to remove any null data items from then you can use the following function. It will create a new array and only copy across items from the existing array if they contain a value. If the value is an array the function calls itself and makes sure that the returned array contains something before adding it to the new array.

function array_purge_empty($arr) {
 $newarr = array();
 foreach ($arr as $key => $val) {
  if (is_array($val)) {
   $val = array_purge_empty($val);
   // does the result array contain anything?
   if (count($val) != 0) {
    $newarr[$key] = $val;
   }
  } else {
   if (trim($val) != "") {
    $newarr[$key] = $val;
   }
  }
 }
 return $newarr;
}

Here is an example of the function in action.

// create array with some null items in it.
$array = array('a','b'=>'',3,0,' ',NULL,'',array(),array(1),4);
// print array 
echo '<pre>'.print_r($array,true).'</pre>';
// print result of array_purge_empty() function
echo '<pre>'.print_r(array_purge_empty($array),true).'</pre>';

This produces the following output.

Array
(
 [0] => a
 [b] =>
 [1] => 3
 [2] => 0
 [3] =>
 [4] =>
 [5] =>
 [6] => Array
  (
  )
 
 [7] => Array
  (
   [0] => 1
  )
 
 [8] => 4
)
 
Array
(
 [0] => a
 [1] => 3
 [2] => 0
 [7] => Array
  (
   [0] => 1
  )
 
 [8] => 4
)

Of course a simpler solution might be to use the PHP function array_filter(), which will remove any false entries. Additionally, if this function doesn't quite get all of the entries you wanted to catch you can include a function callback as the second parameter, which will allow you to refine the filtering done on the array. However, the array_filter() function is not recursive so I created the above function to provide a recursive array filtering function.

PHP

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