Remove empty values from array PHP

In this post, you will learn how to remove empty values from an array using the PHP programming language.

In the website development, we may face a situation where an array contains one or more empty values that we need to remove. It is easy process to remove empty values from an array. PHP provides array_filter() function to remove or filter empty values from an array. This function typically filters the values of an array using a callback function. If no callback function is specified, all empty entries of an array will be removed. This will also remove blank, null, false, 0 (zero) values.

Syntax

array_filter($array, $callbackFunction, $callbackParameter)

Here the $array is the only required parameter. The parameter $callbackFunction is the callback function specified for the operation on the array. The parameter $callbackParameter tells about the parameters passed to the callback function.

$array = array("Banana", 0, NULL, "Apple", 0, "Papaya", "Orange", NULL, 0);
var_dump($array);
 
// filtering the array
$result = array_filter($array);                 
var_dump($result);

array (size=9)
  0 => string 'Banana' (length=6)
  1 => int 0
  2 => null
  3 => string 'Apple' (length=5)
  4 => int 0
  5 => string 'Papaya' (length=6)
  6 => string 'Orange' (length=6)
  7 => null
  8 => int 0

array (size=4)
  0 => string 'Banana' (length=6)
  3 => string 'Apple' (length=5)
  5 => string 'Papaya' (length=6)
  6 => string 'Orange' (length=6)

Use empty() with unset() function

We can also use the empty() along with the unset() function to remove the empty values from an array. The empty() function is used to check if an element is empty or not and the unset() function remove the empty array elements in PHP.

<?php

// Array declaration
$array = array("Apple", null, 0, null, "Orange", false, "Pineapple"); 
             
// Find empty elements and  
// unset the empty elements 
foreach($array as $key => $value)          
    if(empty($value)) 
        unset($array[$key]); 
          
// Print the array elements         
var_dump($array);
?> 

array (size=3)
  0 => string 'Apple' (length=5)
  4 => string 'Orange' (length=6)
  6 => string 'Pineapple' (length=9)

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