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.
The tip offered in this post is actually documented in date page of the PHP manual but it’s one of those things I wasn’t aware of until seeing it in an example somewhere else just before posting this so I thought I would share it here. It’s how to embed some literal text in the …
We use Zend Lucene Search on a PHP ecommerce website and ran into some issues where records added to the search index from the website interface weren’t the same as when created from the command line. It turned out to be a locale issue and setting the locale fixed the problem.
A clue that something wasn’t working correctly was this error message:
iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string
There are a variety of conversions that can be done which fix this error, but our problem appears to have been caused by a non-configured locale, defaulting to “C” and which does not support UTF8.
In PHP, you can call “setlocale(LC_ALL, 0)” to find out what the locale is currently set as. Running through Nginx with PHP-FPM, it output this:
C
and from the command line this:
en_NZ.UTF-8
Running “locale” from a SSH terminal session output this:
LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_NZ.UTF-8" LC_ALL=
which would indicate the CLI script is picking the locale from the system, but Nginx/PHP-FPM is not.
It’s possible to set the default locale in the php.ini file, although it might not be a good idea if you run many websites on your server as it could cause issues.
Instead use the setlocale() to set it specifically for your website. Check out the www.php.net/setlocale manual page for more information about the function.
In my case, we did this:
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_NZ.UTF-8');
This then solved the issue with adding documents to the Lucene index.
A little while back I posted how to set cookies with jQuery and was asked about the domain setting and how setting the domain affects sub domains. This post explains how cookies and domains work, and covers some tests I did to check my assumptions were correct.
A PHP install on Debian 5 by default does not include the Xslt extension which means the following error will occur if trying to use the XsltProcessor class: " Fatal error: Class ‘XsltProcessor’ not found…". This post shows how to install the extension on Debian 5.
The PHP file_put_contents() function is a useful shortcut for dumping a string into a file (compared with using fopen, fputs etc). By default it will create a new file if it does not exist, or overwrite the file if it does exist. Recently I re-read the documentation for this function and discovered it is also possible to append to a file with file_put_contents.
PHP’s filter_var function can validate if an IP address is valid and can further validate if it is an IPv4 IP, IPv6 IP, or not within the private or reserved ranges. This post shows some examples using filter_var.