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.
PHP allows you to set a variety of configuration settings in either the web server’s configuration (e.g. Apache’s httpd.conf or .htaccess) and using the ini_set function. The PHP manual contains a complete list of php.ini directives and this short post is simply my place of bookmarking the list, as I often need to refer to …
I’ve been working at a new job and the interesting thing when working with other people’s code is you often learn a heap of stuff you didn’t already know. A couple of weeks ago I came across a way to merge arrays in PHP with the + operator, instead of using the array functions (e.g. array_merge) so share this here.
The PHP SimpleXML extension makes it easy to work with XML files by creating an object from the XML structure. To access an element’s attributes, use the property() method for that element.
Many websites use Feedburner to serve their RSS feed. The link from the Feedburner feed to the article is a Feedburner URL which then redirects to the original URL. The original URL is still contained in the XML for the feed in the element named <feedburner:origLink> and this can be parsed out using PHP’s SimpleXML library, but it’s not quite as simple as referring to ->feeburner:origLink because this will not work.
I’ve been working with the PHP templating engine Smarty at a new job and needed to be able to dump a list of variables that had been assigned to Smarty for debugging purposes. This quick post shows how to dump the variables in your PHP code.
PHP’s parse_url function makes it easy to extract the domain, path and other useful bits of information from a full URL. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as when spidering content from a website and needing to extract particular pieces of information from the links in the page.