Category: Software Development

Serialization in PHP is the act of converting a variable into a storable value. When I say storable, I mean being able to store the result in say, a database or a flat file. This is commonly applied to arrays and objects as they are not simply text strings. Under…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…