Tag: PHP

I recently updated [HolidayAPI][holidayapi] to no longer use my PHP framework because I wanted the system to be easier for new developers to get up and running. Instead of including configuration files for Apache or nginx, I decided that I should just use the web server that’s baked right into…

Variable variables are one of my favorite things about PHP. PHP allows you to use a variable to reference another variable. This comes in exceptionally handy when you need to create variable names dynamically: $variable = ‘This is my variable’; $var = ‘variable’; echo $$var; Let’s say you have you…

I’ve never actually used this function, but could definitely see using it to help profile a system and/or to help identify defined but unused variables. To obtain an array of all of the defined variables you would: $defined = get_defined_vars(); The function returns a multi-dimensional array of all of the…

JSON is one of my favorite human readable formats. It’s widely used and has great support in PHP as well as other languages. PHP allows you to easily convert variables into JSON and JSON into objects or arrays. First, let’s take a look at how we can convert an array…

We previously discussed how to calculate the length of a string in PHP and I made mention that using that function is how you would go about truncating a string if it’s over a specific length. I also said that down the road I would discuss the topic at hand,…

All the good things about Easter aside, it’s one of those holidays that’s a pain to get the date for. This is because the date of Easter is based on the lunar cycle and Spring Equinox (March 21st). The date of Easter on a given year could fall between March…

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…