HTML form truncation: stops parsing on empty string

Hi, everyone,

PHP seems to hang up when it finds an HTML text input with a value of
either '0' or ''. Anything that would return "true" when tested with
empty() seems to prevent all of the following inputs from being parsed
into the $_REQUEST string, even PHPSESSID and some hidden inputs that
are hard-coded into the form.

Basically, I'm losing data unless dummy values are filled in. What
gives?

I would like to give users the option of leaving an input blank one
time, and a different input blank the next, so re-ordering the form to
handle truncation due to empty strings really isn't an option.

Default values for the inputs are already being set by querying the
database of existing fields, so it would be trivial to append ' ' to
each. Unfortunately there would still be the possibility of error if a
user deleted the space, and in any event this would be a hack rather
than a real, elegant solution.

Any advice?

.