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.
Google have finally made an API available for Google Analytics although it’s currently in beta and the specs are subject to change. I’ve been playing around this morning logging in usingClientLogin Username/Password Authentication with PHP and CURL and show how to do this here. In future posts I’ll look at how to actually use the API but this will get us all started for now.
PHP has a large number of configuration option which can be set in the php.ini file, Apache <virtualhost> blocks, .htaccess files and ini_set(). This post looks at how to set PHP configuration options with Apache’s .htaccess files.
PHP has the function get_defined_functions() which allows you to get a list of all the available system and user defined functions in an array. This post looks at how to use the get_defined_functions() function, the output from it and how to sort the list into alphabetical order. Using get_defined_functions() get_defined_functions() returns an array containing two …
I covered how to use PHP's fputcsv without writing to a file in yesterday's post and look at a practical example today: fetching data from MySQL using PDO and sending it to the browser as a CSV, using the fputcsv() function.
In the past I’ve written about how to save data as a CSV file using PHP, MySQL queries and mysqldump and in this post show how to send the results of this data to a web browser setting the headers correctly with PHP so the browser gives you a "save as" dialog instead of displaying it on the page. The headers also include the filename which is supplied as the default in the save as dialog.
This post shows how to use the MySQL "SHOW TABLES FROM" SQL query to get a list of tables using PHP. This list could either be stored to an array or echoed out to web browser, command line etc.