PHP is a powerful open source server-sided scripting language that can be used on a wide variety of operating systems and webservers, including Apache on UNIX and IIS on Windows.
PHP contains numerous extensions which enable you to dynamically create images and flash files, parse xml, connect to remote servers using pop, imap, ftp, http and raw sockets, natively access many database servers including PostgreSql, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, compress and decompress files, lookup domain names and and much more.
PHP has an excellent manual and online documentation which covers every function for every extension available.
A couple of weeks ago I posted how to read through a directory with PHP using the opendir() readdir() and closedir() functions and now look at the glob() function. glob() returns the filenames into an array and supports pattern matching so it can be very easy to find e.g. jpg images in a particular directory.
This post has some example PHP code which can be used to work out which error_reporting levels are reported and which are not from an integer value.
PHP’s fputcsv function is very useful for creating CSV files, but by default will write out to a file. There are a couple of tricks to be able to keep it all in memory or instead write the CSV data out directly to the web browser without having to write your own custom functions.
If you are attempting to get files with a .html extension parsed as PHP with Nginx + php-fpm, you might get an "access denied" error in your browser, and the error message "Access to the script ‘…’ has been denied (see security.limit_extensions)" in your Nginx error log. This post shows how to allow html files to be parsed successfully as PHP with Nginx + php-fpm.
PHP’s PDO has a nifty way of fetching database records into an object, but there’s a slight gotcha when also using a constructor which initializes the class properties.
If you’ve got a filename that you need to remove the extension from with PHP, there are a number of ways to do it. Here’s three ways, with some benchmarking.
A few days ago, I posted how to temporarily change the auto increment increment in MySQL. This post has an extension class to PHP's PDO to get the current auto increment value, change it to a new value and then reset it back to the original.
After doing an upgrade on my Debian virtual server, which upgraded PHP and Nginx, I got a "502 Bad Gateway" error when browsing websites on that server. This post shows how to fix this problem, and the configuration option to prevent it occurring again on reboot.
Pandora is a music streaming service which can be accessed via a web browser, smartphone/tablet app or desktop app. There is a closed API which can be used to extract some information from Pandora (and edit radio stations etc). This post looks at using a PHP API by Alex Dallaway to access radio stations and bookmarks from Pandora.
PHP has a Reflection API adds the ability to reverse-engineer classes, interfaces, functions, methods and extensions. I needed to use it to get all the publicly accessible properties for a class that aren’t static, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to get this "out of the box".
