tidying an array

[shanks]

First thing I should point out is that I'm still fairly new to php so if this is a stupid question, apologies!

-

I'm creating a site that uses faceted classification - I've got to the part where I query the database and have had the results returned.

These I then add to an array - however, when I print out the contents of the array, there are lots of empty values - is there a way to clear these up? To remove any part of the array that doesn't have either letters or numbers in?

Thanks for any help.

[Thora_Fan]

When you are printing out the data in the array to the page, I am assuming you are using a loop of some kind. I would test for empty values prior to doing anything with the array values.

Example:

for($nIndex = 0; $nIndex <= count($myArray) - 1; $nIndex++)
{
      if (trim($myArray[$nIndex]) != "")
      {
             // do something
      }
}

Hope this helps.

[laserlight]

Considering that you're querying a database for this data, you might want to consider tailoring the query to SELECT only those rows whose fields are NOT NULL, or something along those lines.
The array you then retrieve would then immediately not contain such elements, saving you effort in using PHP to filter out such elements.

Otherwise Thora_Fan's suggestion is a good one, though in more complete form it might be something like:

//callback function to test for non-empty elements.
function nonEmpty($value) {
	return trim($value) != "";
}
$array = array_filter($array, "nonEmpty");