Question

I have an array thats got about 12 potential key/value pairs. That are based off a _POST/_GET

The keys are not numeric as in 0-n, and I need to retain the keys with there values where applicable. My issue is I know that on occasion a key will be passed where the value is null, empty, or equal to ”. In the event thats the case I want to trim out those keys before processing my array. As running down the line without something there is going to break my script.

Now a while back I either made or found this function (I don’t remember which its been in my arsenal for a while, either way though).

function remove_array_empty_values($array, $remove_null_number = true)
    {
        $new_array = array();
        $null_exceptions = array();
        foreach($array as $key => $value)
        {
            $value = trim($value);
            if($remove_null_number)
            {
                $null_exceptions[] = '0';
            }
            if(!in_array($value, $null_exceptions) && $value != "")
            {
                $new_array[] = $value;
            }
        }
        return $new_array;
    }

What I would love to do is very similar to this, however this works well with arrays that can have n-n key values and I am not dependent upon the key as well as the value to determine whats what where and when. As the above will just remove everything basically then just rebuilt the array. Where I am stuck is trying to figure out how to mimic the above function but where I retain the keys I need.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly what you’re after, you can use array_filter() or you can do something like this:

foreach($myarray as $key=>$value)
{
    if(is_null($value) || $value == '')
        unset($myarray[$key]);
}