Parsing XML in PHP couldn’t be easier thanks to the SimpleXML extension. SimpleXML allows you to read in an XML string, verify that it is in fact XML and can create an object that you can interact with by way of the node names in the XML.The SimpleXML extension also
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I have an upcoming freelance project coming up that includes checking an IMAP email account as well as working with XML in PHP. Let’s talk about connecting to an IMAP account in PHP, don’t worry, I’ll discuss parsing XML next week ;) For the sake of example, we’re going to
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A little late on the Mother’s Day part, but since today is Father’s Day, I figured it would be fun to discuss how to obtain the dates for these moving holidays. To do so, all we need to use is use strtotime and tell it when the holiday will occur
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Have you ever run into a scenario where you have to loop through a set of data and perform database queries for each iteration? Obviously we shouldn’t run them one by one, so we end up using a TRANSACTION or even just building out one large query in the case
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You are probably already familiar with $_GET, $_POST and $_REQUEST but what about $_PUT? Trick question, $_PUT (as well as as $_HEAD and $_DELETE) doesn’t exist in PHP at this time. Never fear! We can create a $_PUT array with the following code: if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'PUT') { parse_str(file_get_contents("php://input"), $_PUT);
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I’ve been taking a lot of programming tests / challenges recently as I was in the market for a new [and hopefully exciting] opportunity to spend my time on. Because of this, I am full of new blog post ideas based on the questions / challenges asked. This week I’m
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I tend to shy away from these self gratifying posts about my own open source contributions, but I’m going to make the exception because this particularly library has been receiving quote a few downloads this month. I’m unsure for the increase, but my Google Places PHP Library has had over
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Previously, I had shown you how to install PHP Redis from source but things changed with the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Now you can install the phpredis extension from the Ubuntu respositories. First, if you don’t have it installed already, let’s install Redis: sudo apt-get install redis-server After we get
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Installing the PHP module for MongoDB on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is just a command away, but first, let’s ensure that we have MongoDB itself installed: sudo apt-get install mongodb Once we have MongoDB installed, we can proceed with installing the module. Please note that you could combine these commands to
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Last week I covered setting up a LAMP server on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but for my money, it’s all about LEMP stacks. The “E” actually stands for Nginx (pronouced Engine X) and it’s an altnerative to the Apache web server that is built for speed and has a very low
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The newest long term support release of Ubuntu (Trusty Tahr) is finally here! I just spun up a droplet over on DigitalOcean to walk through setting up a LAMP stack for this post. I also recommend making sure that your system is completely up to date. At the time of
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Today I went on a mission to find a PHP function that I’ve never used before and knew nothing about. The mission was such a success that I have two functions to discuss and honestly, I’m pretty sure I’ll never use them. That being said, if the need ever arises
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I’ve discussed the use of preg_replace_callback in the past in regard to passing variables to anonymous functions but never touched on how to use preg_replace_callback or the fact that the /e modifier has been deprecated in PHP 5.5+. Even though /e still works in PHP 5.5 in the near future
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PHP Data Objects (PDO) is arguably the best database abstraction layer available in PHP. It provides a consistent interface across multiple datasources (MySQL, PostgreSQL, et cetera) and helps boost your site’s security by way of prepared statements. It even supports transactions which we’ll be taking a look at here. Database
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Zero filling (or zero padding) is when you pad a value on the left side to a specific length. This is something you will commonly see in database schemas for integer columns. But what if we’re not working with data that’s already zero filled by a database? All we have
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One of PHP’s most powerful features are arrays and the multitude of functions available to interact with and manipulate them. Arrays can be indexed by integers as well as string, known as an associative array. Instead of looping through the array with foreach and assigning the key to another array,
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The other day I ran into a situation (first time, it seems) where I needed to access a variable inside of an anonymous function inside of preg_replace_callback(). My first thought, even though it went against my better judgement was to simply define the variables as global inside of the function.
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Continuing my showcasing of all of the awesomeness in PHP 5.5 that I am discovering since my upgrade from 5.3, let’s discuss using the the list() function inside of a foreach() block. Have you ever had a situation where you are looping through a multi-dimensional array and the array is
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I’ve previously posted about upgrading to PHP 5.5.x on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but what about my friends still on the even older Ubuntu Long Term Service release that’s still supported, 10.04 LTS. That particular version’s server release will remain supported until April 2015, with more than a year left at
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Support for generators (via the yield keyword) has been added to PHP 5.5 and allows you to create simple iterators without the use of the Iterator interface. What’s this all mean? It boils down to overhead, generators use less memory than an implementation of the Iterator interface or simply creating
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Imagine my surprise to see this warning during my morning review of the rootkit checkers that run nightly on my boxes. The thing is, there were no other anomalies on the box aside from /usr/sbin/php5-fpm being bound to a port that was suspected of belonging to a rootkit. The fact
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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: ' .
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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
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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
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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
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