Page 6 of Software Development Articles
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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Have you ever asked yourself, “I wonder which of these blocks of code will run faster?” I know I have and I use a very basic template for setting up these benchmarking experiments. The gist of the script is to run through each block of code n times tracking the
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The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers that are derived from the previous numbers in the sequence. The sequence starts at zero and each subsequent number is sum of the previous two numbers in the sequence. There are a number of ways to accomplish this and the most common
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I came to a very liberating conclusion the other day. I need to stop fucking around with MySQL, or any other RDBMS, and fully embrace a NoSQL server as my primary data store. I’ve been a huge fan of Redis for quite some time but the fact that everything lives
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I’ve previously discussed installing the MongoDB module but have yet to touch on how to actually do anything past the install. The first thing to do is to connect to the MongoDB server. This can simply be done like this: $client = new MongoClient(); This will connect to the default
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I recently had the opportunity to have a discussion about API design and RESTful services with Vasusen Patil. I’ve also been having quite a few conversations of similar nature with Justin Davis over the last few months. These types of conversations are some of my favorite because, for the most
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I’ve had this question come up a few times in the past on interviews, how would you merge two sorted arrays and keep their sort order intact? The easy / PHP answer is to simply use array_merge() and then sort() the resulting array. Technically this works but the whole point
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Visibility of functions and properties is very important when you are attempting to lock down certain aspects of an object. In PHP there are three levels of visibility, public, private and protected. Let’s take a look at what each one means. Public Public is the easy one. It’s the default
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For me, “done” means that something I have been working on is to the point that I no longer have to work on it, indefinitely. Depending on the nature of the task it could also mean that it’s been shipped to production and again, no longer requires my efforts. I
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As sites and system grow and scale, the need for internationalization and localization (i18n and L10n respectively) of content becomes a necessary task. There’s not much to it on the surface, you need to be able to serve up the same content in different languages. This includes abstracting out words
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SimpleXML with all of it’s faults is still a great way to interact with XML. Most of it’s shortcomings are related to debugging and how it handles invalid XML is no exception. Let’s take a look at what happens when we load an invalid XML string: $xml = " <?xml
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I think one of my biggest gripes with adopting that TDD life is that I feel I’m in the minority with my friends even though the concept appears to be quite mainstream these days. One of the common pushbacks I receive is that it’s hard to write unit tests for
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I love hosting my blog on GitHub by way of Jekyll but the Liquid templating system is far from a robust scripting language in my opinion. With the rise of Medium, I’ve been seeing the read time on more and more articles and figured it was time to add the
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Fizz buzz is a fairly common screening question to help sniff out non-programmers during the interview process. The task is to print out numbers 1 through 100 but for multiples of 3 print out “Fizz” instead of the number and for multiples of 5 print “Buzz” instead. If the number
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I’ve been doing a lot of API integration recently and cURL ends up being exceptionally handy when you are POSTing to an endpoint. Fortunately using cURL in PHP is really easy: // Sets our destination URL $endpoint_url = 'https://somesite.com/path/to/endpoint'; // Creates our data array that we want to post to
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