It’s common that you need to reformat the texts in PHP and make them look a little more formal. For example, the first letter of all sentences should be uppercased, or with a title, the first letter of all words should also be made uppercase; in other situations, you may want all letters to be …
Everyone who ever dealt with formatting code in PHP string manipulations may want to switch between different tab sizes or simply change spaces to tabs or tabs to spaces in the formatted code string. The function we’ll need for these is str_replace(), the string search and replace php function. For example: Switch between tabs and …
If you want to loop through a literal string in PHP and have the opportunity to look and process each of the characters one character at a time, use the following snippet: $string = "Hooray"; for ($i = 0, $j = strlen($string); $i < $j; $i++) { echo $string[$i].’, ‘; } There you go, just …
PHP: How to process a string one byte (character) at a time Read More »
As a web site templating language, string processing is what PHP is good at. There’s always a chance that you need to verify and make sure if a string contains another string. For example, to check if an at sign is included in the entered email address by a visitor: if (strpos($_POST[’email’], ‘@’) !== false) …
PHP: Check if a string contains another string or substring Read More »
Programmably, there are several different types of date and time in PHP you can create and process. Consequently, you have several types of current date and time in PHP that can be generated and used. Below is a list of functions that returns the current date and time: The current Unix timestamp: time() The current …
Ideally, global variables outside a function can not and should not be accessed from within the function to hold up the programming modularization paradigm. However, if you really need to do this, especially in small programs, you can declare the variable again inside the function by the keyword ‘global‘ so as to use inside the …
PHP: How to access a global variable inside a function without passing it? Read More »
As we all know that JavaScript is usually what involves in detecting different browsers and their varying capabilities. PHP has the very function that parses the HTTP request headers sent by client web browsers so as to determine the identify of the requesting browser as well as its capabilities. To get client browser information and …
One of the things the remote web server inspects is the client cookie to know about the requester. If you need cURL to simulate a user browser that sends cookie information to the web server, you need the following options: $c = curl_init(‘http://www.example.com/needs-cookies.php’); curl_setopt ($c, CURLOPT_COOKIE, ‘user=ellen; activity=swimming’); curl_setopt ($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $page = curl_exec …
PHP cURL: Fetching URL and Sending Request with Cookies Read More »
By default, all HTTP requests made out by cURL is GET requests that simply fetches the URL and don’t submit any more POST variables. However, if you need to fetch and retrieve URL by the POST method with cURL, you need the snippet below: $url = ‘http://www.example.com/submit.php’; // The submitted form data, encoded as query-string-style …
To draw a line, use ImageLine( ): ImageLine($image, $x1, $y1, $x2, $y2, $color); To draw an open rectangle, use ImageRectangle( ): ImageRectangle($image, $x1, $y1, $x2, $y2, $color); To draw a solid rectangle, use ImageFilledRectangle( ): ImageFilledRectangle($image, $x1, $y1, $x2, $y2, $color); To draw an open polygon, use ImagePolygon( ): $points = array($x1, $y1, $x2, $y2, …
Debugging a PHP script, you may want to alter the error-displaying sensitivity on a particular page and control what types of errors should be reported. The solution is the PHP error reporting function error_reporting(): error_reporting(E_ALL); // everything error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_PARSE); // only major problems error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE); // everything but notices As the parameters of …
PHP: Change Error Reporting Level | Different PHP Error Types Read More »
A hash or digest can be thought of as the digital fingerprint of a piece of data. Hash is usually generated from any string of text in a fixed length by a one-way mathematical process. It is next to impossible to re-engineer the original text or data from the hash alone. Also, it is vast …
PHP: What is Hash? | Hashing a String | Generate Hash of Strings Read More »
Back tick ` in PHP is used to read the output from another program, usually external commands in Linux shell, much like the way a pipe does the job with bash. In PHP, Backtick “ embraced string is treated a command and executed externally in shell, returning the execution results from the standard output. For …
Of course, you will have to read in the file first, preferably in an array. To read a file in an array, you just need the file() function: $lines = file(‘quotes.txt’); Then, you shuffle the array with shuffle() function that randomizes all the items in the array thus shuffling the lines in the file quotes.txt: …
PHP: Randomizing All Lines of a File – Shuffle Lines in a Text File Read More »
As we know, lines are separated from each other by line breaks indicated by “\n” in PHP, therefore, one method would be to explode() the entire file content string by “\n” into an array and then count() the number of the array items to come to the number of lines of that file. However, there’s …
PHP: Count Lines of a File and Get the Number of Lines in a Text File Read More »
Aside from the common approach in reading a file with php fopen() function which is a little annoying in that it requires extra steps before actually reading the contents of the file. PHP has other file reading functions to enable you instantly get what you want and read the contents of the file without the …
PHP: Reading a File into a String or Reading the File into an Array Read More »
By remote file, I mean files from another website or web server identified by a remote URL. Usually, you can open such a file via the normal procedures you would take to open a local file with php file functions such as fopen() or file_get_contents(). However, to make this work, you will first make sure …
So you need a temporary file to hold some middle data. There are 2 functions in PHP you can use for creating temporary files: PHP function tmpfile() creates a temporary file, opens it and returns the file handler: $temp_fh = tmpfile(); f write($temp_fh, "The current time is ".strftime(‘%c’)); // the file automatically goes away when …
PHP can only copy, rename or move files that are of the same owner with who is running the PHP script. After making sure of this, you can proceed to: Copy a file to another place in PHP: $old = ‘/tmp/yesterday.txt’; $new = ‘/tmp/today.txt’; copy($old, $new) or die(“Unable to copy $old to $new.”); Rename a …
The function in PHP that’s used to create a directory is just the same with that in Linux bash shell: mkdir. First make sure the current working directory is where you want the new directory to be, then run this line of PHP: mkdir(‘new_dir’); // creates a new directory named new_dir under the current directory
