Category: Software Development

String dereferencing allows you direct access to individual characters. The dereferencing syntax is just like accessing an array element by it’s index: $string = ‘This is my awesome string!’; echo ‘First Character: ‘ . $string[0] . “n”; echo ‘Tenth Character: ‘ . $string[9] . “n”; echo ‘Last Character: ‘ ….

I had previously discussed using try / catch / finally and a fine reader pointed out that I didn’t mention catching multiple exceptions. He’s right, I dropped the ball and decided to dedicate today’s post to catching multiple exceptions. To catch multiple exceptions you will need to be using code…

Saving files to disk is a pretty simple task in PHP with file_put_contents(). Here’s how to write a string to a file: $string = ‘I AM STRING!!’; file_put_contents(‘/path/to/destination’, $string); It is generally good practice to only do with when you are dealing with smaller strings as you can run into…

I do a lot of coding in Python and one thing that I really love is the mindset of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. What’s this mean? It means that instead of sanity checking every little thing, just handling the exceptions that are thrown instead. In PHP this can…

switch/case statements are one of my favorite anti-patterns not because I prefer to write spaghetti code but because they can make if/elseif blocks look a ton cleaner. Why would it be considered an anti-pattern? Because it could easily be abused to the point that you are munging up your control…

I’ve been doing a ton of optimizations on one of my main sites and one thing that I’ve been doing more and more is trying to reuse objects whenever possible. What’s this entail? All it takes is creating a static function to return an instance of the object instead of…