form validation for NOT matches

[eluser]JHackamack[/eluser]
OK, so what should be happening is your browser might not support placeholder values, such as Firefox or Safari, etc. Another option to look at is javascript to capture the form submit and check to make sure the form has all the values filled in. This is commonly called Client Side Validation. Unfortunately I'm not as good at it so I can't help.

One thought that came to the top of my head is, before validation, replace "First Name" with "" in your post values

IE:

Code:

$_POST['first_name'] = str_replace("First Name","",$this->input->post('first_name'));

That way you can use set_value like you were originally doing and hopefully it might work.

Jacob