CodeIgniter $this->input->post() is empty when values are text, but integers work ok

I'm doing maintenance on a website that another developer created. The client was having some data display issues and I narrowed it down to their input form, or more specifically, the POST data processing. All the fields are TEXTAREA fields and the controller function looks like this:

 85                 $data=array(
 86                         'f_location'=>$this->input->post('flocation'),
 87                         's_location'=>$this->input->post('slocation'),
 88                         't_location'=>$this->input->post('tlocation'),
 89                         'forthlocation'=>$this->input->post('forthlocation'),
 90                         'fifthlocation'=>$this->input->post('fifthlocation'),
 91                         'sixthlocation'=>$this->input->post('sixthlocation')
 92                 );
 93                 $query=$this->admin_model->updatelocation($data);

The updatelocation function in the model is:

 54         function updatelocation($data){
 55                 $query=$this->db->where('id','1');
 56                 $query=$this->db->update('location',$data);
 57                 
 58                 if($query){
 59                         return true;
 60                 }else{
 61                         return false;
 62                 }
 63         }

For whatever reason, whenever I submit any sort of text data through the form, it stores it in the database as a '0'. When I submit integers, it stores the integers directly. To make matters weirder, I just tried to do a print_r($_POST) inside the controller function and if there is any integers, all data is accepted, including text. If all of the fields are text, the $_POST array is empty.

I am not a pro on CodeIgniter by any means, but I can at least work my way around it, and I can't figure this one out.

Here's the list of what I've checked so far:

• XSS Filtering is off


• Form Validation is not being used


• Database collation/character set doesn't affect it (currently utf8_unicode_ci)


• Database data type is set to text


• Tried adding trailing / to form action


• db_debug is enabled in config/database.php (no errors reported)

I'm sure there's a few other things I've tried that I can't think of right now. Oh, and one other weird thing. I have a local development server in my house. When I download the entire codebase to that server, everything works fine. Literally the only change I make is the baseurl in the config so it works locally for me, and then everything works just fine: text, integers, everything. It's only on the remote hosted site that the text won't go through. Any help is appreciated. I'm thoroughly stumped.