Calculating the length of a string is a useful feature of any language, in fact it’s one of the few pieces of functionality that has a consistently simple syntax across modern languages. You can calculate the length of a string as part of some server side user input validation or
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The hostname of your server or local system is an easy way to determine which environment you are working with, either local or production. Prior to PHP 5.3 you would need to utilize the php_uname() function and with 5.3+ there is a built-in function for getting the hostname: pre-5.3 $hostname
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As cliché as this post’s title is, I tend to forget this simple truth from time to time. This week was one of those weeks where I learned a ton of shit. Worked with some new to me libraries. Learned a new term that I’m on the verge of over
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You may already be familiar with file_get_contents() for reading the contents of a local file but did you know that you can use it to read the contents of a remote file or site? You can then use file_put_contents() to write the file’s contents back to disk: file_put_contents('./some/local/file', file_get_contents('http://phpave.com')); Both
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Basic HTTP Authentication is easily accomplished at the web server level (by way of .htaccess with Apache or inside your nginx configuration file) but did you know you could pull it off inside of a PHP script? You bet your butt you can! First, you will need to interrogate the
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The irrational mathematical constant of Pi can be obtained a few different ways in PHP. There is a function to give you the value as well as a bunch of constants that represent Pi as well as fractions of Pi and it’s square root. Heck, you could even do it
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String replacements in PHP are very simple and as per usual, can be done in a variety of different ways. First let’s take a look at the most simple form of a string replacement: str_replace('blue', 'red', 'My favorite color is blue'); The first argument is the string you want to
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Last week in part one, I discussed the lifecycle of a developer that just started a new job. The gist was that when someone starts a new role at a company, they generally have to learn the lay of the land. Regardless of their technical prowess there is always a
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Rounding numbers can be done a number of ways. You can round a float up or down to the nearest integer or you could round to a specific precision. Even then you can choose whether or not to round halves up or down and even round towards even and odd
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This is a pretty universal truth, most developer titles are complete and utter nonsense. Shit like “Junior Developer” and “Senior Engineer Level 2”, sounds like we’re playing Dungeons and Dragons. Sad part of this is, most people will say they don’t care about titles but then they are quick to
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It felt a bit like cheating to split this post up so I figured I would just cover all of the decimal to… functions in one post. Decimal, also known as base ten, is the numerical base we are most accustomed to. From time to time we need to convert
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We can file this one under the “PHP functions I never knew existed and probably will never use” category. Seems that as of PHP 4.2.0 and beyond there was the inclusion of an is_finite() and an is_infinite() function. The names are pretty self explanatory and I’m sure there are some
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Figured I would keep up the trend of talking about finding the smallest and largest values in arrays by talking about finding the smallest or largest value in a set of values. Incidentally, doing so will utilize the same min() and max() functions we used previously. Not one of my
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Last week we discussed how to find the smallest value in an array so it seemed fitting to discuss how to find the largest value in an array. As we previously discussed back in the day you would have to loop through an array and compare values until you found
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Finding the lowest value of an array is a pretty common task in PHP, especially when you are dealing with things like scores or money. In the old days before PHP 4, finding the lowest value of an array meant looping through the array and comparing values until you had
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Converting an array to a string is a pretty frequent task when programming. Whether you want to join some sentences into a paragraph or just smash the values into some sort of hash, you can do so very simply with PHP’s implode function. Implode takes 1 to 2 arguments. In
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The holidays are upon us so it’s time for my obligatory holidays themed post! Keep in mind that the title may say Christmas but you could apply this same logic to any holiday or date of your choosing. $christmas = date('Y-12-25'); $today = date('Y-m-d'); echo (strtotime($christmas) - strtotime($today)) / 86400;
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Reversing a string in most languages is a pretty trivial task. In PHP we have a dedicated strrev function to do so: $string = 'This is my awesome string!'; $reverse = strrev($string); But what if this function didn’t exist? How would you go about reversing the string? For me, I’d
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To start, let me put it out there that I’ve drank the kool-aid and have been doing a ton of hacking with Node.js (and soon enough, IO.js). I’m going to save the details for another post though. So an observation I’ve been making recently is that it seems like the
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From time to time I need to loop through a date range. One approach is to generate a start date and an end date and then add 1 day to the start date until it reaches the end date (or whatever interval you want to increment by). This works wonders
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Converting a string to an array is a pretty common task when programming in PHP. If you don’t know much about PHP you could easily fall into a situation where you’re manually looping through each character in a string checking for a delimiter or keeping a counter and assembling strings
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Convenience is rarely economical. Shredded cheese tends to be more expensive than a block of the same type. Pre-chopped vegetables are the same way. But when you spend that little extra, you gain that back in time that you don’t have to spend doing the prep work. Technology doesn’t always
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Arrays are a great way to store / work with data. In PHP, arrays are one of the most powerful data types of available. From time to time, you need to sort an array in reverse order. Of course, PHP has you covered: $array = [ 1 => 'one', 2
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Like most things, you can solve this problem with a number of different approaches. Without knowing about array_rand in PHP, you could end up doing something like this to pull a random value from an array: $array = ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five']; shuffle($array); echo $array[0]; The array is shuffled
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Prior to PHP 5.3 the act of calculating the difference between two dates was a bit more manual than it is now. By manual, I mean there wasn’t a function that existed to aid in the process if by nothing else, the documentation itself. Let’s take a look at how
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