Re: RFC: blank() Function as a Complement to empty()

On 5 April 2025 21:00:15 BST, Rob Landers <rob@bottled.codes> wrote: >I agree with most of these. I do not agree that " " (a space) is blank though. For >people without last names, this is often their last name to pass validation on forms. This is firmly into "space-bar heating" [https://xkcd.com/1172/] territory - failure to trim whitespace before validation is a common bug, and requiring a name in exactly two boxes is a common design/localisation failure, but neither justifies the other. I think a function for "string is zero length or contains only whitespace" would potentially be useful, but am not convinced it needs to accept any other type, or have the error-suppression power of isset/empty - adding ??'' inside a function call is not a big burden for new code. That said, I just realised there is a ctype_space function, and I've never used it or seen it used; normally, trim($foo)==='' (or trim($foo??'')==='') seems to be good enough. Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]