PHP programmers are frequently into using the various is_x group of functions: is_int, is_null etc. All of this functions take a single parameter which leads you to believe that other similar constructs take only a single parameter. Like the isset and unset constructs, which by the way take multiple parameters as shown below, which might help you save some keystrokes.
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php
Creating custom stream filters
In this post we will see how to create a custom stream filter. Streams, first introduced in PHP 4.3, provide an abstration layer for file access. A number of different resources besides files – like network connections, compression protocols etc. can be regarded as “streams” of data which can be serially read and written to.
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Validating POST fields the easy way
Validating POST data from a form is a common requirement for a developer. If the number of form fields are few than the validation is a small matter. But the case is different when the form contains more than 15 or 20 fields and some of the fields are mandatory. The following code will give you an idea of how to easily validate mandatory fields, whatever the number of fields.
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Creating a Figlet text in php
Zend_Text_Figlet is a Zend component which enables developers to create a FIGlet text. A Figlet is nothing but a technique of creating large letters using ordinary text. I don’t know how to make a use of this in my daily matters, but its a nice recreation. A short history on Figlet can be found here. An example and the code to generate it is shown below.
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Easy way to build GET query strings in php
Passing variables with a url is such a frequent thing programmers do that most of you may think this post is unwarranted. We call this method of passing variables as GET, the other being POST. It is one of those things which can be easily done in php. Lets take an example. You are to query a database and for that you need to send three variables via GET – city, id, paid.
The common way to pass them via GET is to construct a query string as below:
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Simple Pagination in PHP tutorial
Pagination is a frequent requirement in web development projects. Most PHP developers must have already implementated paging in one form or other in their projects. In this post we will see how to add pagination the easy way using PEAR’s Pager class. Note that in all the posts I use PHP 5.x.x, so if you are still stuck at version 4.x.x, its already time to upgrade.
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WHOIS directory lookup in PHP
Net_Whois lets you query a internet name directory service in a easy to use manner. WHOIS is a protocol which is widely used to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address by querying an official name database. One possible application I can think of is to see if DNS servers are set correctly for various domains I handle regularly.
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Ping a server using PHP
PEAR’s Net_Ping is a niffty wrapper class for executing ping calls from PHP. You can use it to check if a remote server is responding correctly. The library can be download from here.
Installation
Net_Ping being a Pear package we will use the Pear installer to download and install it. I recommend to always use the Pear installer to download packages rather than downloading it manually as the Pear installer automatically downloads any dependent packages.
pear install Net_Ping-2.4.4 |
Usage
A example of using Net_Ping is given below.
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Reading raw POST data in PHP
A quick tip for reading raw http POST data in PHP. For example if we have a xml posted to a page, we can read the raw data with the following code.
$xml = file_get_contents('php://input'); |
We could use $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA instead, but many times it does not work due to some php.ini settings. Note that ‘php://input’ does not work with enctype=”multipart/form-data”.
converting MySQL queries to xml
There frequently arises a need to return mySQL query results in xml. Maybe you need to send the xml data to the browser or you want to use it as a xml request to a web service; whatever the application, the following function will return the result of a sql query in xml format.
The function accepts 3 parameters. The first is the mysql query result resource, the second is the name of the root element and the third the name of the first child of the root. All the fields from the mySQL table will be sub elements of this child.
The function is shown below:
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