Category: Software Development

In a previous post we discussed how to tell whether or not you are on the command-line from within your PHP script. Today we’re going to talk about passing command-line arguments to your script. When on the command-line two variables are available to you, $argc and $argv. They are the…

So who remembers back in the day when one of the coolest things you could have on your website’s footer was the page load time? As passé as that may seem in this day in age, it’s still something that can be useful when attempting to profile a site or…

When running PHP from the command-line interface, the availability of some variables and functionality may or may not be available. Case in point, when running command-line PHP sessions are not available and $_SESSION is undefined. When you’re on the command-line there’s also the possibility that you want to use the…

We’ve discussed how to check if a class has a function but what if the class doesn’t exist at all? To check if a class exists you can use, use guessed it, class_exists(). if (class_exists(‘MyClass’)) { $object = new MyClass(); } else { throw new Exception(‘The class MyClass does not…

We’ve previously discussed how to check if a function exists but that only works on standalone functions like the ones built into PHP as well as any user defined functions. Luckily there’s a function for that called method_exists(). When speaking in the scope of a class, the functions are referred…

Let’s use json_encode as an example here. Prior to PHP 5.2.0 JSON support was only available via a PECL extension and since 5.2.0 it’s been available as part of the PHP core. You could check that the server is running PHP 5.2.0 or above, but that could result in a…

If you write and/or use open source software, you know that running an up to date version of PHP is a must. This can be a problem sometimes, like if you are running on a host that doesn’t run the most up to date version of PHP. Another scenario would…

I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine the other day and we got on the topic of PHP not having a very standardized error system. Now that he’s working with Python the mix of errors and exceptions in PHP is an apparent shortcoming. PHP is funny like…