It is common to import CSV files into MySQL database. You can do this with phpMyAdmin with small CSV files but with large ones, you would probably encounter the memory error and had to switch to MySQL command line “LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE” to do the job. It looks like something like this: LOAD DATA …
MySQL: LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE only imports 1 or 2 rows? Read More »
Sometimes you would want to check if a string is an acronym or an abbreviation by testing if it only contains capitalized letters from A to Z and nothing else. There are 2 ways to accomplish this simple task in PHP. ctype_upper() Use the native ctype_upper() function and you will know if the provided string …
PHP: Check if A String Contain Only Uppercase / Capital Letters Read More »
This post is dedicated to one of my friends, Coolie (not his real name but he preferred to be called that way among friends), a father and self-entrepreneur who created the outstanding Delphi VCL component for FFmpeg that makes it extremely easy to develop audio and video applications for Windows. For those who are not …
FFVCL – FFmpeg Delphi VCL for Video / Audio Apps Development Read More »
While you can somewhat rely on the name extension of a file to determine the mime type, it may not always be accurate. For example, .jpg and .jpeg files are very probably image/jpeg files and .png files are very probably image/png files, but there’s always an exception because file extensions can be faked. To accurately …
Other than making your 404 error page user friendly, you can redirect it to your index pages such as the homepage, sitemap, or search page, to make it useful for the users. Instead of relying on them to correct the error themselves, you offer the new orientation. How to redirect a 404 error page to …
You can save re-usable data in database such as MySQL so you can load them among different scripts / script sessions, though it may be a bit overwhelming for simple tasks because you have to set up a whole database and the connection credentials, etc.. File system is probably a better approach with regards to …
PHP: Store Array in File – Read / Write Arrays in File Read More »
Provided that your user account on the server has the privileges to access crontab thus can create or remove cron jobs, you can use this PHP class to integrate crontab in your application. I created it for many of my own projects that need crontab to do scheduled jobs. It’s pretty straightforward. Don’t know what …
PHP: Crontab Class to Add, Edit and Remove Cron Jobs Read More »
I coded a lot in Zend Studio 5.5.1, the gold old version that’s insanely popular because it made it so easy to code in PHP. As PHP evolves, ZS 5.5.1 gradually falls behind of the edge and it simply becomes imperative that you switch to the latest version of Zend Studio, the 8. The IDE …
Given a directory, how to display the contents (directories and files under it) of it recursively and exhaustively? Here’s the code: $dir = ‘/path/to/directory’; // without trailing slash, can be absolute paths such as ‘/home/jim/public_html’ or relative paths such as ‘samples’ getDirContents($dir); function getDirContents($dir) { if (is_dir($dir)) { $dirs = explode(‘/’, $dir); $last_dir = $dirs[count($dirs) …
PHP: Display Files and Sub-directories of A Directory Recursively as A Tree Read More »
I’m not an expert but I’ve had my own errors and trials along the way so here I am. These are all the tips I believe you should use when you are optimizing for MySQL database performance. Some stuff may be very handy, but they may not be good for performance. Design Normalize first, and …
phpMyAdmin doesn’t show the exact size in MB when the size of your database exceeds 1GB. It just shows something like 4.2GB, truncating everything out in the 100MB precision. So is it possible to get the database size in MB in exact numbers using MySQL query? Yes, it is: SELECT CONCAT(sum(ROUND(((DATA_LENGTH + INDEX_LENGTH – DATA_FREE) …
MySQL: Get the exact size of a database by SQL query Read More »
ASCII is the most fundamental character set that has been around since the early days of command line interfaces. There are 128 (0 – 127) most basic ASCII characters such as a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and all the printable punctuations you can type out by a single strike of your keyboard. As all ASCII characters have …
MySQL: Find non-ASCII characters in a table column Read More »
You can export any MySQL database or table into an XML file by the exporting capabilities of phpMyAdmin, the web interface of MySQL. The problem with this approach, however, is that with large tables, you may have to manually export the table more than once by sections into several sequential XML files. A better approach …
One of my old Internet friends Brad made a very nice online slide that introduces to you some of the exciting new features of PHP 5.3. I’m most interested in namespace that would make coding in a large project and code reuse much easier, especially for people who find keeping naming conventions a challenge in …
Checklist slides to learn the new features in PHP 5.3 with examples Read More »
Was doing something with a regular expression and very oddly the connection keeps being reset every time I refresh the web page. I tried to narrow down the problematic line by removing the code in functional chunks. Finally it comes down to a preg_match() instance with a small bit in the regular expression that’s accidentally …
A small mistake in a regular expression caused connection to reset – (.+)+ Read More »
MySQL tables can be exported to SQL dump file which is basically a text file of SQL queries that can be used to import the table back into database. To export MySQL tables into other formats such as CSV, phpMyAdmin proves to be very handy if you have changed the execution timeout in seconds to …
I have WAMP server installed on my local computer for PHP and MySQL development. After using it for a while, the MySQL installation folder has run up some seriously huge log files that are taking enormous amount of disk space. We are talking 10s of GB here. The file names are like ibdata1, mysql-bin.000017, etc.. …
MySQL log files are taking a lot of disk space – How to disable and delete them? Read More »
It can be annoying when MySQL imports your UTF8 database (which contains exotic characters other than those in English) in the default character set of latin1_swedish_ci, jeopardizing the text content. It is also annoying when phpMyAdmin does the same and when you forgot to set the collation to utf8_general_ci for the new database which is …
MySQL: Change Default Character Set or Default Collation in phpMyAdmin Read More »
Linux timestamp is a number of seconds from the Epoch of Linux, large number of seconds. When you are counting the time interval between 2 times or 2 dates, the result is usually in seconds as well. Understandably, it’s everything but user friendly to just present the number of seconds to the users, e.g. 153297 …
Often we need the users to enter a valid string of date or time in the form. But how do you validate the strings with regular expressions? In PHP, you can use these functions and regular expressions. RegExp and function to validate against date string: // Default: YYYY-MM-DD function isDate($subject, $separator = ‘-‘) { return …
