Recursively remove empty elements and subarrays from a multi-dimensional array

Question

I can\'t seem to find a simple, straight-forward solution to the age-old problem of removing empty elements from arrays in PHP.

My input array may look like this: <

Answer 1

The accepted answer does not do exactly what the OP asked. If you want to recursively remove ALL values that evaluate to false including empty arrays then use the following function:

function array_trim($input) {
    return is_array($input) ? array_filter($input, 
        function (& $value) { return $value = array_trim($value); }
    ) : $input;
}

Or you could change the return condition according to your needs, for example:

{ return !is_array($value) or $value = array_trim($value); }

If you only want to remove empty arrays. Or you can change the condition to only test for "" or false or null, etc...