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.