CHECKING FOR SPACES IN OTHERWISE BLANK FIELDS WHEN USING IF STATEMENTS - Mar 7th, 2023

When using “if” statements to suppress titles and other information in a viewer if a field is empty, it’s easy for client’s to leave blank spaces in an otherwise empty field and defeat the “if” test. Now, thanks to a plugin (CMSB version 2.04 or above required) written by Dave Edis of Interactive Tools, it’s even easier to guard against this by checking to see if the content is text and not just a space and automatically deleting the space before saving the record so that they can’t interfere with any “if” tests. It works in both text and WYSIWYG fields You can download this plugin from: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/downloads/removeExtraWhitespace3.zip The plugins won’t delete errant spaces in otherwise blank fields that already exist in your saved records, but you can still check for them in each if statement used on your page. To a normal “if” statement: <?php if ($yourRecord['title']): ?> Title: <?php echo $yourRecord['title'] ?> <?php endif ?> Just add this code: && !ctype_space($yourRecord['title']) And the result: <?php if ($record['title'] && !ctype_space($record['title'])): ?> <?php echo $record['title'] ?> <?php endif ?> (Which means "if title has a value AND it's NOT (!) all spacing characters, then show it" will solve the problem.) According to Dave Edis, This technique will not work if the content has PHP tags in it, but will for whitespace. Also note this will not strip leading or trailing spaces from the content. To do that gets a little more complex.

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