Most efficient way to replace empty values in an array - php

Question

Is there a better way of doing this PHP code? What I'm doing is looping through the array and replacing the "title" field if it's blank.
if($result)
{
$count = 0;
foreach($result as $result_row)
{
if( !$result_row["title"] )
{
$result[$count]["title"] = "untitled";
}
$count++;
}
}
Where $result is an array with data like this:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[title] => sdsdsdsd
[body] => ssdsd
)
[1] => Array
(
[title] => sdssdsfds
[body] => sdsdsd
)
)
I'm not an experienced PHP developer, but I guess that the way I've proposed above isn't the most efficient?
Thanks

Answer 1

if($result) {
foreach($result as $index=>$result_row) {
if( !$result_row["title"] ) {
$result[$index]["title"] = "untitled";
}
}
}
You don't need to count it. It's efficient.

Answer 2

if ($result)
{
foreach($result as &$result_row)
{
if(!$result_row['title'])
{
$result_row['title'] = 'untitled';
}
}
}
Also, you may want to use something other than a boolean cast to check the existence of a title in case some young punk director releases a movie called 0.
You could do something like if (trim($result_row['title']) == '')

Answer 3

Mixing in a little more to #Luke's answer...
if($result) {
foreach($result as &$result_row) { // <--- Add & here
if($result_row['title'] == '') {
$result_row['title'] = 'untitled';
}
}
}
The key is the & before $result_row in the foreach statement. This make it a foreach by reference. Without that, the value of $result_row is a copy, not the original. Your loop will finish and do all the processing but it won't be kept.
The only way to get more efficient is to look at where the data comes from. If you're retrieving it from a database, could you potentially save each record with an "untitled" value as the default so you don't need to go back and put in the value later?

Answer 4

Another alternative could be json_encode + str_replace() and then json_decode():
$data = array
(
0 => array
(
'title' => '',
'body' => 'empty',
),
1 => array
(
'title' => 'set',
'body' => 'not-empty',
),
);
$data = json_encode($data); // [{"title":"","body":"empty"},{"title":"set","body":"not-empty"}]
$data = json_decode(str_replace('"title":""', '"title":"untitled"', $data), true);
As a one-liner:
$data = json_decode(str_replace('"title":""', '"title":"untitled"', json_encode($data)), true);
Output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[title] => untitled
[body] => empty
)
[1] => Array
(
[title] => set
[body] => not-empty
)
)
I'm not sure if this is more efficient (I doubt it, but you can benchmark it), but at least it's a different way of doing the same and should work fine - you have to care about multi-dimensional arrays if you use the title index elsewhere thought.

Answer 5

Perhaps array_walk_recursive:
<?php
$myArr = array (array("title" => "sdsdsdsd", "body" => "ssdsd"),
array("title" => "", "body" => "sdsdsd") );
array_walk_recursive($myArr, "convertTitle");
var_dump($myArr);
function convertTitle(&$item, $key) {
if ($key=='title' && empty($item)) {$item = "untitled";}
}
?>

Answer 6

If you want sweet and short, try this one
$result = array(
array(
'title' => 'foo',
'body' => 'bar'
),
array(
'body' => 'baz'
),
array(
'body' => 'qux'
),
);
foreach($result as &$entry) if (empty($entry['title'])) {
$entry['title'] = 'no val';
}
var_dump($records);
the empty() will do the job, see the doc http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.empty.php