CodeDiesel : Resources, tutorials and articles for the Web Developer and Designer

Archive for the ‘data’ Category

Migrating Access MDB to MySQL

A recent task needed me to import a large amount of data from a Access MDB database to MySQL. My first choice for the job was the mdb-tools set of utilities. mdb-tools provides a set of tools and applications to export MDB data and schema to other databases such as MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and [...]

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Tags: database

Semantic markup for better search results

In: data|html

Search-engines have reached a impasse with respect to understanding of HTML data. Although most sites, especially databases centric sites use structured data in the backend, once the data is rendered as HTML the data looses all its structure and makes it difficult for search engines to understand them correctly. Until now most search engines have [...]

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Tags: semantic web

International Airport codes download

In: data

During a recent project I needed a database of IATA airport codes. Airports around the world are universally known by a unique three-letter code: the “International Air Transport Association (IATA) Location Identifier”. It is much easier for pilots, travel agents, frequent flyers, baggage handlers and anyone having anything to do with airlines to say and [...]

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Tags: data

Unpacking binary data in PHP

In: data|php

To set the stage we will start with a programming problem, this will keep the discussion anchored to a relevant context. The problem is this : We want to write a function that takes a image file as an argument and tells us whether the file is a GIF image; irrelevant with whatever the extension [...]

(5) Comments
Tags: functions

Raw vs. cooked PHP $_POST variables

In: data|html|php

A little quirk of PHP $_POST var I encountered while fixing a Salesforce web-to-Lead bug. A WordPress site was using a form to submit user requests to the Salesforce web-service. The form that submitted the data had the following fields along with the others. The problem was with the multi-select field, only the last value [...]

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Tags: post data

Generating random data on the client side

In: data|javascript|libraries|testing

Automatically creating fake or sample data is a frequent requirement for front-end web developers. Although usually not tedious, there are times when you need to quickly and automatically generate structured data for your html forms or CMS systems for testing purposes. Faker.js is a JavaScript implementation inspired by Benjamin Curtis’s Ruby Gem Faker and Perl’s [...]