PHP-Scripts Blog » PHP 5.x

Bendable runtime methods and member variables in PHP5

TDavid — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 03:40:39 +0000

The introduction of new object-oriented programming (OOP) features in PHP V5 has significantly raised the level of functionality in this programming language. Not only can you have private, protected, and public member variables and functions — just as you would in the Java™, C++, or C# programming languages — but you can also create objects that bend at runtime, creating new methods and member variables on the fly. You can’t do that with the Java, C++, or C# languages.

How many readers are using PHP 5 now in a production environment? We are still using in test environment but getting closer to deploying on a production box.

AJAX MyTop

TDavid — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:34:10 +0000

Man, how many clicks does it take to get the download these days at Sourceforge? Seems like it took me a half dozen to get to the AjaxMyTop project download.

MyTop creator Jeremy Zawodny writes:

Someone has built and AJAX powered version of mytop, the little console based MySQL monitoring tool I wrote years ago. I guess it’s now buzzword compliant.

mytop is a handy little program for monitoring MySQL queries that we’ve used in the past on a couple of our boxes so I decided to fire up this AJAX version and see how it fared. AjaxMyTop received 3.7 out of 5 rating at Ajaxian as of this writing.

Installation started at 8:38am PST. gunzip ajaxMyTop.tar.gz. tar -xvf ajaxMyTop.tar. Threw dom errors right away, documentation is non-existent. Error was result of PHP 5.x required for the program. Turns out Michael Kimsal hacked up processlist.php to work in PHP4. Here is the PHP 4 process.php source file you’ll need if you aren’t running PHP5. And no, I didn’t clean up the indenting. Total time spent on this project: 20 minutes.

PHP 5.1.0 now available

TDavid — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 04:21:50 +0000

PHP 5.1.0 has been released on Thanksgiving. Changelog

symfony open source php5 framework

TDavid — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:53:11 +0000

Based on the concept of Rails / Django like framework only for PHP, here comes the MIT licensed symfony

Parsing names and numbers out of text

TDavid — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 04:51:28 +0000

At one of our sites we needed to parse out some names and numbers from a log file. The strings also contained comment text and the order would be mixed format. These types of regular expression parsing can be tricky.

Let’s take a look at the two possible formats of the strings:

FORMAT #1:
[00:02:18][jvastine]7.52..I agree with Rowdy, but they do have potential!

FORMAT #2:
[00:02:18][@Forser]My vote is 5

Can you see a pattern for extracting the name and numbers from the string? Let’s whip up the code to parse these two types of strings as a test:

$text = array(‘[00:02:18][jvastine]7.52..I agree with Rowdy, but they do have potential!’,
‘[00:02:18][@Forser]My vote is 5′
);
foreach($text as $string) {
print “

testing: “ . $string . ‘
’;
preg_match(“/\[([\@a-z]+)\]([a-z ]+([0-9\.]+)|([0-9\.]+))/i”,$string,$matched);
print “$matched[1]
”;
if($matched[3] != ”) {
print sprintf(“%02f”,$matched[3]);
} else {
print sprintf(“%02f”,$matched[2]);
}
// end for loop
}
?>

Note the use of the sprintf() to format the number because it might be a decimal. We can trim the decimal if it’s all zeroes, but in some cases we may want to include the decimal. Also as one of my smart tech friends pointed out a string that contains multiple numbers could screw this up.

FORMAT #3:
[00:02:18][jvastine]16 hot dogs…I vote is 7

Now how would we parse out the vote of 7 and ignore the 16? This one is a bit easier because we could analyze the numbers (by going to $match[4], $match[5], etc), since a valid rating is only 1-10 in the above example, but what if there was a format with multiple rating numbers?

FORMAT #4:
[00:02:18][jvastine]6 hot dogs…I vote is 7

How to determine which is the vote in this case? This is a trick question. And not as easy one. Thoughts?

Using header to redirect the browser

TDavid — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 02:16:31 +0000

The PHP header function allows redirection of the browser, among other cool things.

Example redirecting the browser to php-scripts.com homepage:

header(”Location: http://www.php-scripts.com/”);
?>

Using floor and time to calculate number of days elapsed from UNIX timestamp

TDavid — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:06:51 +0000

Finding out the number of days elapsed from a UNIX timestamp is actually pretty straightforward. If you only know two dates then first you’ll need to convert the date to a UNIX timestamps and then subtract the most recent timestamp from the older timestamp like this:

$old_timestamp = 1102971600;
$elapsed_seconds = time() - $old_timestamp;
print ‘Seconds elapsed since ‘ . date(“m-d-Y H:i:s”,$old_timestamp) . “: $elapsed_seconds”;
?>

Now, let’s convert those seconds to days using the floor() function, by just adding the following code to the code above:

/*
divide #seconds by 60 for minutes
divide #of minutes by 60 for hours
divide #of hours by 24 for days
use floor to get integer for day
*/
$elapsed_days = floor(($elapsed_seconds / 60) / 60 / 24);
print “
Number of days elapsed: $elapsed_days”;

How to use preg_replace to replace phrase between question marks

TDavid — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:03:52 +0000

$string = “?This is a test that should be in single quotes quotes?”;
$text = preg_replace(”/(\?([^\?]+)\?)/”,”‘\\2′”,$string);
?>

regular expression produces:

This is a test that should be in single quotes’

How to make an anniversary counter announcement script using ordinal numbers

TDavid — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:01:55 +0000

Today being it is our 16th wedding anniversary I decided it would be appropriate to build a small script to keep track and post a message automatically on our special day together. I wanted this program to remember what year of our anniversary it was without me having to remind it: a great use for a variable.

$anniversary_date = ‘0919′;
$start_year = 1989;
$the_suffix = ‘th’;
$number_years = (date(“Y”) - $start_year) . $the_suffix;
if(date(“md”) == $anniversary_date) {
print “Happy $number_years anniversary, Kara!”;
}
?>

Something worth noting is 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th will work with the $the_suffix … but what about 21st, 22nd, 23rd? Do we need to add filtering or does the date PHP function offer something to automatically provide this for us?

In fact it does! It’s called the ‘S’ suffix and works good as a date parameter for dealing with this situation. For example:

print “today is the “ . date(“dS”) . ‘of the month.’; // adds st, nd, rd, th
?>

This will output the proper 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, etc format.

Now how can this be made to work on any number, not just a date because I’m optimistic that we’ll be together beyond 31 years. One solution is to create your own function, as robf did and posted to Zend in the way of an ordinal($number) function.

I remained curious, though if we could fake a date in years, and then strip the first part of the years off to cover any possible usage of anniversary numbers and not have to resort to using our own function? We can do this up until our 69th annivesary using mktime(), date and substr() functions using the following code:

$elapsed = date(“Y”) - $start_year + 2001; // add 2001
print “
Today ($elapsed) is our “ . substr(date(“YS”,mktime(0,0,0,0,0,$elapsed)),2,4) . ‘ anniversary.’; //
?>

Definitely not the most practical code on the planet, nor anything I’d ever use beyond just playing around aloud here, but I was trying to stretch my brain for other possible ways to do this using built-in PHP functions.

Have I missed a built-in PHP ordinal number function that works like the S suffix in date()?

I’m sure my wife would rather get flowers than flowery code. I better get on that!

How to PHP scripting course begins Friday 9/23/2005

TDavid — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 22:15:03 +0000

For those who would like to learn how to write PHP code, starting next Friday at Webmaster Cookbook, our family friendly webmaster how-to site/blog, we’ll be going through a 32 week course on PHP programming. Details will be announced during the radio show and podcast next Friday September 23, 2005 at 3:30pm PST. For those interested in learning how to write PHP scripts, this should prove to be a very useful course. I know a lot of really cool scripts and even full websites came out of the course when we originally debuted it over five years ago.

Focus will be to update this course material I wrote back in July/August 2000. We’ll be introducing many of the new PHP functions. I’m looking very forward to this course and to see what students do with it.

Mark your calendars.