Question

I’m trying to hide the display of custom fields if they have no values. If I display them with the_meta, then the headers show, whether or not there are any values in the Custom Fields.

It generates this html:

<ul class="post-meta">
<li>
<span class="post-meta-key">My Custom Field Title</span>
</li>
<li>
</ul>

I really don’t want titles on the page if there’s no content. So I tried:

<?php
$ck = get_post_custom_keys($post_id); //Array
    foreach ($ck as $k) {
         $cv = get_post_custom_values($k, $post_id );  //Array
            foreach ($cv as $c) {
                echo (' - ');
                echo ($c);
            }
    }
?>

Echo for $c (the custom values applied to the post) looks like this:

With no values:

• 1 – 1343633746:1 – – field_5014a45c9a2df – field_5014a48c38f9d – – field_5014a48c2cc82

With values:

• 1 – 1343603999:1 – 3 cups of eggs – field_5014a45c9a2df – field_5014a48c38f9d – 2 cups of flour – field_5014a48c2cc82

This is probably the long way to go about it. It’s showing values for things like “last edit” too, not just the two fields that I put in to test.

How I can show the Custom Fields only if they have values? I’m writing a theme, so I do not know the names of the fields, or how many, beforehand.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can check for empty values with empty(), you can check if the field starts with underscore (internal values like _edit_last) and skip those.

<?php
$ck = get_post_custom_keys($post_id); //Array
    foreach ($ck as $k) {
         if (substr ($k, 0, 1) == '_')
         {   // skip keys starting with '_'
             continue;
         }
         $cv = get_post_custom_values($k, $post_id );  //Array
            foreach ($cv as $c) {
                if (empty ($c))
                {   // skip empty value
                    continue;
                }

                echo ($k . ': ' . $c . '<br/>');
            }
    }
?>