On more than one occasion, I've found myself executing some PHP along the lines of this:

 1<?php
 2 
 3// Some user-generated array of input
 4$input = [ ..., ];
 5 
 6foreach ($input as $field) {
 7    if (trim($field) === '' ) {
 8        continue;
 9    }
10 
11    // Persist the value into the database
12}

This has happened one time too many now, and seeing as pretty much all of my projects now are built on top of composer, adding a helpers.php file into my project and autoloading it makes including a generic function to handle this really easy.

 1/**
 2 * Ensure that the input array has no empty-string values assigned.
 3 *
 4 * @param  array  $array
 5 *
 6 * @return array
 7 */
 8function array_clean(array $array)
 9{
10    // Trim the array input values
11    $array = array_map('trim', $array);
12 
13    // Filter any empty-string values out
14    return array_filter($array, function ($item) {
15        return $item !== '';
16    });
17}

Now, any time you need to work with a one-dimensional array that may have empty fields in it that you don't want to use, you can tidy up the earlier example a little bit:

1<?php
2 
3// Some user-generated array of input
4$input = array_clean($request->input('user_input'));
5 
6foreach ($input as $field) {
7    // Persist the value into the database, no longer worrying about saving empty values to the db
8}