Question

I have CKEditor embedded in my page. I need to prevent plain whitespaces and breaklines that doesn’t come with any characters. There must be at least one actual visible character.

The following answer is totally not consistent, sometimes it works fine and sometimes it does nothing, it allows whitespaces:

if(!empty($_POST['rtxt_article']))
{
    if (trim(strip_tags($_POST['rtxt_article']))) {
      // do something
    }
    else
    {
      //ops! please fill in data
    } 
}
else
{
   //ops! please fill in data
}

I also tried this:

$plainText = strip_tags($_POST['rtxt_offer']);
$isNotEmpty = trim($plainText);
if($isNotEmpty)
{
   //do something
}

When the above snippet doesn’t have effect anymore, i put ! sign and the snippet works again. After a while, the snippet doesn’t work until i remove ! and vice versa. Totally inconsistent. This is how i put !:

if(!$isNotEmpty) ...
if (!trim(strip_tags($_POST['rtxt_article']))) ...

Any idea? Any other solution?

Answer 1

Give this a shot. It will first check to see if their is actually input but using the empty() function. With adding the ! to empty() what happens is that the if statement is being asked if $_POST[‘rtxt_article’] is NOT empty, meaning that there is at least once character in it.

if (!empty($_POST['rtxt_article']) && trim(strip_tags($_POST['rtxt_article']))) {
  // do something
}

If for some reason it is still being passed with the new line character, then you could scrub the $_POST var first.

---

edited:

$var = trim($_POST['rtxt_article']);
if (!empty($var)) {
  // do something
}