Now let’s add some style magic to give the output a blackground with red numbers:

Finally we need to create some program logic to test when to reset the game number to 1. An IF statement will suffice and we’ll also add some code to go to show the next game number.

In the meantime a good question came in on the sorting post back in October from Beregszászi Mihály, who wrote:

I have got a problem:
rsort($numbers);

Print:
9
8
7
70
6
69
68
67

This is my problem! My dream:
70
69
68
67
66
65
9
8
7
6

The first thing I did was whip up some example code to test the rsort() and asort() functions. I didn’t find the situation that he was talking about so I tried to work it backwards and treat the numbers as strings with spaces and possibly returns and other hidden characters in them.

This created the following sort bug that Beregszászi was talking about (and yet he didn’t offer the code for):

[code=”html”]
Reverse sort -> rsort()
9,8 ,70 ,7 ,69 ,68,67,6
[/code]

Solution
What Beregszászi is looking for is a numerical sort using data that isn’t in numerical type. To change the type this is called casting. PHP isn’t as anal as some most languages about using the right type but it is critical in some most other languages. It’s best to get in the habit as a programmer as always ensuring the data type matches or you’ll end up with type mismatch errors (in PHP you’ll often end up with unexpected results).

First we need to type the data as a number so we can sort it properly. We can do that as follows:

Now it will sort as the “dream” option he requested.

The title of this thread kind of gives it away. Note the “1 Answers” should actually read “1 answer” and then when there ar 2 or more it should be pluralized. Let’s build some quick and dirty pluralizing code using PHP.

The example above seems to work great, but there is a bug in it. What if you pass this string:

The answer is it will return the wrong answer (14 answer, not plural) because only the first character is being evaluated. We need to strip out the number in the beginning first instead of using substr. Here’s the corrected code.

This will return the following:

If you would like to add commas just use the built-in number_format() function like this:

Oops, that dropped the answer, didn’t it? So we need to include in the pluralize() function like this:

Now we’ll get 1,456 Answers pluralized.

Other solutions
Here’s another way to pluralize that requires passing a number and arguments in various languages.

Short domain:
mughd.com

Typed into cell phone / portable device as:
6-88-4-44-3 [char] 222-666-6

I used [char] because how to type in a period can vary depending on the device. This counts as only one character. That’s a total of 15 characters to type in a five character domain.

Let’s create a script to automatically perform the same checks. We’ll start with a 26 character array to define the code for each character.

This will produce output that looks like this:

By changing the $test_in to a different domain you can test different codes. I created a form version where you can just enter in the url at TD Scripts in the Webmaster Utilities area here: http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/easy_cell2.php

Argh, it seems like the code snippet plugin is eating some of the code again. For the HTML portion view the source code of this page.

File path
$file_path = ‘/usr/web/tdavid/php-scripts.com/main/index.html’;

URL
$url_path = ‘http://www.php-scripts.com/main/index.html’;

Now let’s dump this into a script and see the output:

This will produce output that looks like the following:

Working example here.

file_get_contents has only been available in PHP since 4.3.0. Here is how to make it backwards compatible to version 3.xx of PHP by using file and implode:

Now let’s say you wanted to make your own file_get_contents function for pre 4.3.0? Here’s what you would do:

Here’s the code to check the hours in the day starting with 0 (midnight) and ending at midnight (23):

Notes: The range function is handy for prefilling with a string or array with numbers. Now what if you want to show alternating messages, one on the even hours and one on odd hours? The following code will do just that if you change the print statement to be whatever you want to alternate:

Update 10/9/08 7:16am PST: Thanks to several commenters below who pointed out that there was a missing ‘)’ — it has been added now.

In the above example we are passing by argument the numbers 8 and 3 to the function called addThis and that function is returning the value of 11 (which is 8 + 3) and then assigns the value of 11 to $sum_of_these variable. This would be the same as writing the following without using any function:

Now, let’s say we want to add in a third variable, called $c to the equation. How can we do this in the function addThis without passing it as an argument? We do this by making the $c variable globally available inside the function addThis like this:

Now let’s say we don’t want to use any arguments at all, let’s globalize $a, $b and $c. This code would look as follows:

Still the use of a function above doesn’t make practical sense, but it shows a very rudimentary example of how to use functions, arguments and globals. Now let’s make a better example of a simple calculator:

The above example allows us the flexibility of sending along any three numbers and either add, subtract, multiply or divide. I used a switch statement to illustrate how to check for addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*) or division (/). Readers will note that the default switch is addition, so there is no need for a case block for that.

So if we wanted to multiply the three variables we’d use the following code:

Subtraction, just pass along the ‘-’ like this:

This is a real crude and impractical calculator because a user could enter in a combination of more than three numbers and even multiple operators, but it clearly demonstrates how to pass and return arguments in functions, how to globalize variables and how to perform different operations based on conditions. At the most basic level that is all a calculator does: it takes input and processes.

I’ll leave this type of calculator for a more advanced tutorial (a Part 2, perhaps) or maybe readers would like to build their own? Basically to accomplish a full calculator, the programmer would need to dump all numbers and operators into an array and work through that in the function to return the value. This might be kind of fun for a quick and basic JavaScript app. Don’t even need server side PHP code for this, it could be done entirely in JavaScript in a step-by-step process because a calculator is somethng most everybody understands.