How to validate rich text editor source

Question

I am using CLEditor in my application for rich text that the user will fill in.

When I validate the textarea element in my PHP server side script, I do all the checking e.g. if the element is empty.

There is a problem with this in that the source of the text editor sometimes remains despite the text being cleared.

Here is an example of what I mean:

Say I have a rich text editor as shown below and I have the heading 'write your first page!'.

Here is how the source looks for the above picture:

Then when I remove the text only and NOT any empty lines remaining, the source around the text remains as shown below:

The PHP empty function is going not going to pass as it's technically not empty because of the source code contained in the text editor.

The issue with this is I cannot rely on the user to clear the whole screen including empty lines, so is there a way I can get rid of any source that doesn't contain actual content as the second image above shows?

HTML:

<textarea id="textarea" name="chapter"><h4 style="text-align: center;">Write your first page!</h4></textarea>

Answer 1

If I understood well your problem, you want to know if there is some text or just HTML tags.

In PHP, you can do the follow:

$text = trim(strip_tags($chapter));
if ($text == ''){
   // just HTML tags
}

The strip_tags function removes the HTML tags.

The trim function remove white spaces, break lines, etc...