PHP: Strip null entries from an array : how to
10 Jul 2011For a while i’ve had issues with certain db update queries in php - particularly where image uploads are involved. My original code looked like
<?php
//db update query from form with image upload fields
$data = array(
'company_name' => $form->getValue('company_name'),
'company_image' => $form->getElement('company_image')->getValue(),
'company_logo' => $form->getElement('company_logo')->getValue(),
'website' => $form->getValue('website')
);
$this->update($data, 'id = '. (int)$id);
?>
but using the above code would over write the image fields in the db if the user didn’t upload a new image
to get around this problem i wrote an is_null check on the image fields and pretty much write the $data array twice
- once with the image fields and once without
- as i couldn’t put php code in the middle of the array
- this is a pretty crappy solution so i sat down and figured out a simple way to strip null entries from an array
- see code below
strip_null_array_entries.php
<?php
/*
* use this function to strip null array entries from an array
* useful when doing a db update with pdo/zend_db_table etc..
*/
function strip_null_array_entries($values){
$array = array();
foreach($values as $key=>$value){
if( ($value!=='') AND (!is_null($value)) ) $array[$key] = $value;
}
return $array;
}
?>
now i don’t need to write the $data array twice - i can just use
<?php
$this->update(strip_null_array_entries($data), 'id = '. (int)$id);
?>
