Talk In Code

If you have an array that you want to remove any null data items from then you can use the following function. It will create a new array and only copy across items from the existing array if they contain a value. If the value is an array the function calls itself and makes sure that the returned array contains something before adding it to the new array.

function array_purge_empty($arr){
 $newarr = array();
 foreach($arr as $key=>$val){
  if(is_array($val)){
   $val = array_remove_empty($val);
   // does the result array contain anything?
   if(count($val)!=0){
    $newarr[$key] = $val;
   }
  }else{
   if(trim($val) != "){
    $newarr[$key] = $val;
   }
  }
 }
 return $newarr;
}

Here is an example of the function in action.

// create array with some null items in it.
$array = array('a','b'=>'',3,0,' ',NULL,'',array(),array(1),4);
// print array
echo '<pre>'.print_r($array,true).'</pre>';
// print result of array_purge_empty() function
echo '<pre>'.print_r(array_purge_empty($array),true).'</pre>';

This produces the following output.
Array
(
 [0] => a
 [b] =>
 [1] => 3
 [2] => 0
 [3] =>
 [4] =>
 [5] =>
 [6] => Array
  (
  )
 
 [7] => Array
  (
   [0] => 1
  )
 
 [8] => 4
)
 
Array
(
 [0] => a
 [1] => 3
 [2] => 0
 [7] => Array
  (
   [0] => 1
  )
 
 [8] => 4
)