Articles
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Comparing numeric values is a very common programming task. Which number is greater? is lesser? equal? In PHP like any C-style language, you can do these comparisons with a simple if ( … ) { … } statement: if ($var1…
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How to check if a variable is an integer with PHP
PHP has a variety of functions and approaches to determine if a variable is a number and/or an integer. The problem is that many of the straight forward approaches can result in false positives depending on how they react to…
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How to Strip Whitespace from a String with PHP
Whitespace, it can make all the difference in the world when attempting to determine if a string is empty or not. Anytime you are working with user input I recommend stripping whitespace from both sides of the string. When stripping…
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Simplifying Single Server Deployments
Last week I discussed the importance of version control for individuals but something I didn’t touch on was how version control systems can be used to simplify and/or automate deployments. I’ve been through the different setups out there, using plain…
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How to Increment / Decrement a Number with PHP
Incrementing and decrementing a variable can be accomplished with C-style pre- and post-operators. The pre-operators return the value after it as been incremented or decremented, post- return the value before. Let’s take a look at incrementing first: $i = 1;…
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While you were out – while loops in PHP
while loops are considered the simplest type of loop in PHP-dom. Their purpose is to continue to execute until a condition has been met. Let’s look at an example related to the title, a pseudo-script that will collect messages while…
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New Lines in Command-line PHP Output
If you’ve ever worked with command-line PHP and outputted text you know that PHP takes absolutely no liberties with injecting line breaks into the output. There’s also no magic function or configuration variable that will adjust this behavior. Easy enough,…
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Version Control for Individuals
I find with a lot of folks I interact with, version control is considered something that you use when you are working on a team with multiple contributors. As an individual that is usually the sole contributor of my own…
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How to Output Strings in PHP
Outputting strings is one of the most common actions when building a web site, and PHP offers a multitude of ways to do so each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses print print is a language construct and…
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How to Capture User Input from Command-line PHP
When using command-line PHP capturing input is a bit different than when building a web application. Instead of building a form and interrogating some variables, you have to actually prompt the user for the input and then analyze it to…