10 Replies to "PHP: How to remove empty values from an array"

1. satheesh
   September 25, 2008 at 3:37 PM

   Reply

   This is very very help for me to do dynamic checkbox with multiple textbox fields. To insert in DB.

   Thanks,
   Satheesh kumar.M

2. mohamed
   December 9, 2008 at 11:26 PM

   Reply

   Hi, nice script!
   but instead of this long function try using the following code :

   function filter_string($str){
   if($str == "" || $str == 0){
   return false;
   }else{
   return true;
   }
   }

   $array = array("white", "yellow", 0, "green", " ", "navy");

   $filtered = array_filter($array,’filter_string’);

   echo ‘<pre>’; print_r($filtered ); echo ‘</pre>’;

3. Seth
   January 26, 2009 at 4:48 PM

   Reply

   To make it even easier, PHP's built-in array_filter() function automatically strips any array values that equate to FALSE (which empty strings do). Thus, all you really need is:

   array_filter($array);

4. Gabriel
   January 29, 2009 at 8:09 AM

   Reply

   Seth, I know about array_filter(). However, my function can keep the '0' values (if specified) and also removes the unnecessary whitespace from the string by using trim().

5. Davide
   July 18, 2009 at 8:14 AM

   Reply

   Nice solution, it’s good to have a function doing that, in particular if you would like to do something on array elements rather than simply removing empty elements!

   To simple remove empty elements there’s a really quick solution, only one line of code:

   $SweepedArray = array_values(array_filter($InitialArray));

   Check out the full story here:
   http://www.xomba.com/php_how_delete_empty_values_array_single_line_code

6. Waseem
   December 10, 2009 at 2:43 AM

   Reply

   Thanks for the code, it really helped :)

7. AlexPolo
   June 26, 2010 at 11:55 PM

   Reply

   IMHO, this is much better:
   $new_array = array_diff(array(“white”, “yellow”, 0, “green”, ” “, “navy”), array(‘ ‘, 0));
   print_r($new_array);// Array ( [0] => white [1] => yellow [3] => green [5] => navy )

   In case if the index matters, the following extra step could be performed:
   $new_array = array_merge($new_array, array());
   print_r($new_array); // Array ( [0] => white [1] => yellow [2] => green [3] => navy )

8. kinderjitjit singh
   August 30, 2010 at 6:03 PM

   Reply

   We can also use this function

   public function __removeBlankValues($array_val=array()){
   $returnArray = array();
   foreach($array_val as $key => $val){
   if(trim($val) != ”){
   $returnArray[$key] = $val;
   }
   }
   return $returnArray;
   }

9. zippp
   September 11, 2010 at 2:02 AM

   Reply

   Default PHP function array_keys() with optional second parameter $search_value allows to find keys for the specified value, which let us to find all those empty elements by index and delete them. Of course if you trimmed them before

10. Alex
    May 18, 2011 at 9:56 PM

    Reply

    $new_array_without_nulls = array_filter($array_with_nulls, ‘strlen’);

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