Anchor Text - Can you hide it? (URL Helper) - codeigniter-2

Question

Is there anyway to hide the anchor text of the generated by CI? I know I could hide this via CSS (i.e. negative text-indent), but that seems like a lot of unnecessary work. Why wouldn’t I just use a regular HTML coded anchor?
<?php echo anchor(base_url(),''); ?>

Answer 1

Perhaps they thought that people would likely be passing in a blank string more by mistake than by design, I don't know and can't answer that part of your question.
Using the CodeIgniter anchor method in the URL helper has the advantage of automatically adding in your website's base path if necessary.
If you want to keep using the CodeIgniter helper and have anchors with no anchor text, you have several options:
Option 1: Add a space in the second argument:
<?php echo anchor(base_url(),' '); ?>
Option 2: Extend the URL helper and remove the behaviour:
Go into application\helpers and make a new file, called MY_url_helper.php
You can then put code in there to either replace the anchor method or define an entirely new method.
Here are some code examples of what you could put in the file: (I've adapted the code from the url_helper in a CodeIgniter installation I had handy)
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
if ( ! function_exists('anchor_hide_text'))
{
function anchor_hide_text($uri = '', $title = '', $attributes = '')
{
$title = (string) $title;
if ( ! is_array($uri))
{
$site_url = ( ! preg_match('!^\w+://! i', $uri)) ? site_url($uri) : $uri;
}
else
{
$site_url = site_url($uri);
}
if ($attributes != '')
{
$attributes = _parse_attributes($attributes);
}
return '<a href="'.$site_url.'"'.$attributes.'>'.$title.'</a>';
}
}
or
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
function anchor($uri = '', $title = '', $attributes = '')
{
$title = (string) $title;
if ( ! is_array($uri))
{
$site_url = ( ! preg_match('!^\w+://! i', $uri)) ? site_url($uri) : $uri;
}
else
{
$site_url = site_url($uri);
}
if ($attributes != '')
{
$attributes = _parse_attributes($attributes);
}
return '<a href="'.$site_url.'"'.$attributes.'>'.$title.'</a>';
}