CKEDITOR- How to check empty data after submission in PHP

October 29, 2023

I am using CKEDITOR text editor for description. If I leave it blank or enter some spaces without text, the result comes out like this:

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

The html is:

<form action="<?= base_url('Blogs/submit_post'); ?>" method="post">
    <label>Description</label>
    <textarea id="des" name="descr"></textarea>
</form>

PHP script is (CI4)

$data = $this->request->getVar();
$data['descr'] = htmlentities($data['descr']);
print_r($data);

Now I need that if this textarea submitted without text or white spaces like – <p>     </p>

then the value of $data['descr'] should null

else the value of $data['descr'] = htmlentities($data['descr'])

How can I check that submitted textarea value is empty?

>Solution :

If you want to check if the submitted textarea value contains only non-breaking spaces and HTML tags and treat it as empty, you can also use the strip_tags function in combination with str_replace to remove HTML tags and non-breaking spaces, and then check if the resulting string is empty.

$data = $this->request->getVar();
$cleanedDescr = str_replace('&nbsp;', ' ', strip_tags($data['descr']));

if (empty(trim($cleanedDescr))) {
    $data['descr'] = null;
} else {
    $data['descr'] = htmlentities($data['descr']);
}

print_r($data);

This approach should also work to handle cases where the value contains only non-breaking spaces and HTML tags, treating it as empty and setting $data['descr'] to null.