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.
I recently needed to be able to see what headers the browser sent to the web server with PHP for testing purposes. This is possible using the apache_request_headers() function but it only works if PHP is run on Apache as a module. This post shows usingapache_request_headers() and also an alternative when PHP is run as a CGI. I believe this second method works for lighttpd but have no idea if it works for IIS.
After posting about how to get the meta tags from an HTML web page with PHP was asked how to get the images from an HTML page with PHP like how Facebook does when a link is posted. This post looks at how to get the image URLs from a page using the Simple HTLM DOM Parser library and in a later post I’ll look at how to download the images and make thumbnails.
It’s well known that calling count($array) in a for loop in PHP is slower than assigning the count to a variable and using that variable in the for loop instead. However until recently, I wasn’t aware that the assignment to a variable can be done in the for loop itself and share this here in this post.
While researching some functions for a PHP article I’m writing I came across the get_meta_tags() function and decided to write a quick post about it.
If a resource has been removed from a website, will not be available again and no forwarding address is available then it should return a 410 "Gone" HTTP status. This post explores the 410 status compared with a 404 "Not Found" and 301"Moved Permanently" and shows how to do a 410 with PHP.
This post shows how to get the number of days in a month with PHP by specifying the year and month. This can be useful when generating a calendar application without having to manually code in the number of days each month has, and not having to worry about the number of days in February which varies on leap years.