Tag: PHP

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;…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…