Empty table fields

[MitchEvans]

I know that this is a common problem with html tables, it's quite difficult to put &nbsp in each empty cell as the cells don't know they're empty till they're sent to the next screen.

I've already tried the CSS way aswell of doing table{empty-cells:show} or similar and this only works in Firefox not IE.

Was wondering if there was some code that could find all the empty cells and put "&nbsp" in them?

Please let me know if you know how this would be done,

Cheers Guys!

[NogDog]

How about:

$text = preg_replace('#<td([^>])*></td>#i', "<td$1>&nbsp;</td>", $text);

[MitchEvans]

Once I have that code how do i get it to run in the background with everyone else do I just echo $text???

[NogDog]

It's hard to say exactly without knowing what sort of code you want to plug it into. If you currently do something like:

echo "<tr><td>$var1</td><td>$var2</td></tr>";

You could change it to:

echo preg_replace('#<td([^>])*></td>#i', "<td$1>&nbsp;</td>", "<tr><td>$var1</td><td>$var2</td></tr>");

Or you could do:

$var1 = (trim($var1) === "") ? " " : $var1;
$var1 = (trim($var2) === "") ? " " : $var2;
echo "<tr><td>$var1</td><td>$var2</td></tr>";

Or, you could make a function:

function nbsp($text)
{
   if(trim($text) === "")
   {
      $text = " ";
   }
   return($text);
}
// then in your output code:
echo "<tr><td>".nbsp($var1)."</td><td>".nbsp($var2)."</td></tr>";

In other words, there's probably a hundred ways to do it, depending on your specific situation and which techniques you are more comfortable with.