Question

I have read all other questions, including everything on google. There’s no visible difference between this one and the same method I’m using for register.
It’s a very basic concept that doesn’t want to work.

Doing a dump of $_POST shows the correct empty string, so something else is going wrong somewhere.

Controller

public function details(){
    $this->load->library('form_validation');
    //$this->form_validation->set_message('current-password', 'Incorrect password');
    $this->form_validation->set_rules('current-password', 'Password', 'required');
    $this->load->view('details', $data);
}

View

<?php echo validation_errors(); ?>
<?php echo form_open('user/details'); ?>
    <input type="password" name="current-password" id="current-password" value=""/>
    <input type="submit" class="submit-save" value="save"/>
</form>

Answer 1

You forgot to actually run the form validation:

$this->form_validation->run()

See here: http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/form_validation.html#tutorial