Question

When I test to see if the textarea in my form is empty to do a redirect so it doesn’t submit it in php, it doesn’t work.

The textarea is named $_POST['message'], I know the variable exists because if I do this statement;

if (isset($_POST['message'])) {
    header('Location:/');
    exit();
}

Then it always redirects back to the index page so the variable must exist, although if I do this;

if (empty($_POST['message'])) {
    header('Location:/');
    exit();
}

It does not work, also tried with all three combos of =/==/===

if ($_POST['message'] === '') {
    header('Location:/');
    exit();
}

And also…

if (empty(trim($_POST['message']))) {
    header('Location:/');
    exit();
}

Any ideas why this is happening? And how I can prevent it, I really need to stop it as I do not want empty values in my mysql table.

I did some research and it seems some other people have had this problem, but I have seen no answer as of yet.

Answer 1

You probably have some whitespaces in the string, which isn’t stripped by trim().

Do a strlen() on it to see what’s up, and then log it byte by byte (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/591446/how-do-i-get-the-byte-values-of-a-string-in-php).

One thing you could think about is to make sure your textarea doesn’t have any content in the markup (spaces, linkebreaks, whatever), like this:

<textarea></textarea>