Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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HTML: UTF-8 encoding

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

To get a html page to display UTF-8 encoded text correctly (without setting a default charset) simply add the following to the head of the html page.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

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Posted in HTML, PHP5 | No Comments »

PHP: Converting a bool value to a string value

Monday, July 12th, 2010

The first idea that comes into mind for doing this is to simply make a typecast of the boolean variable to a string and use that (which works)

$testVar = false;
echo (string)$testVar; //will output a empty string (as that evaluates to false)
$testVar = true;
echo (string)$testVar; //will output 1 (as that evaluates to true)

but what if the requirement is that the string should say true or false

$testVar = false;
echo $testVar ? 'true' : 'false'; //will output false
$testVar = true;
echo $testVar ? 'true' : 'false'; //will output true

(While the above example might seam useless I recently had to do this for a db insert)

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Posted in PHP5 | No Comments »

Different line-endings on diffrent OS

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac have different line-endings on text files.

A quick overview on the endings are:

  • Windows-style line endings are CRLF ( \r\n or hex 0D0A )
  • Mac-style line endings are CR ( \r or hex 0D )
  • Unix-style line endings are LF ( \n or hex 0A )

A HEX editor can be used to double check that the correct endings are written.

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Posted in Development | 2 Comments »

PHP: Static functions in a Class

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Static functions can be used without instantiating the object.

A quick example of a static function is shown below as well as a comparison with a non static function.

A quick example of this (in PHP5):

class TestClass{
	static function staticFunction(){
		echo "static function called";
	}
 
	function nonStaticFunction(){
		echo "nonstatic function was called";
	}
}
 
TestClass::staticFunction(); //will echo static function called
 
$testClass = new TestClass();
$testClass.nonStaticFunction(); //will echo nonstatic function was called
unset($testClass);

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PHP: converting a uuid stored as BINARY(16) in mysql to RFC 4122 format

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

If you are storing uuid’s are BINARY(16) in the database, then the following will turn the stored id to the “original” format.

$uuidReadable = unpack("h*",$uuid);
$uuidReadable = preg_replace("/([0-9a-f]{8})([0-9a-f]{4})([0-9a-f]{4})([0-9a-f]{4})([0-9a-f]{12})/", "$1-$2-$3-$4-$5", $uuidReadable);
$uuidReadable = array_merge($uuidReadable);
echo "uuid is " . $uuidReadable[0];

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Posted in PHP5 | No Comments »

PHP5: Quick on timing a script

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Sometimes it is nice to know how long a scrip took to execute (or a part of a script).
This is a simple way to time a script in php.

$time_start = microtime(true);
 
usleep(500);
 
$time_end = microtime(true);
$time = $time_end - $time_start;
 
echo "run time was " . $time . " seconds";

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SimpleXML tags with – in the name

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Sometimes a xml file will have tags with “-”s in the name.
It is not to hard to parse this using simplexml, just use the tagname inside curly brackets like: “{tag-name}”

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<medprod xmlns:npl="urn:schemas-instance" version="129">
  <statuses>
    <mpa_status xmlns:mpa="urn:schemas-mpa" datastatus="valid" procstatus="reviewed"/>
  </statuses>
  <mpa_pharmaceutical-form-group-lx xmlns:mpa="urn:schemas-mpa" v="OSD"/>
</medprod>

Let’s assume we load the above in a SimpleXML object called $simplemedprodXml

$simplemedprodXml= simplexml_load_string($xmlString);
echo (string)$simplemedprodXml['version'];
echo (string)$simplemedprodXml->statuses->mpa_status['datastatus'];
echo (string)$simplemedprodXml->statuses->mpa_status['procstatus'];
echo (string)$simplemedprodXml->{'mpa_pharmaceutical-form-group-lx'}['v'];

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.htaccess to allow google ads (the indexing bot) [or limit user-agents via .htaccess]

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Sometimes there is a need to only allow limit access to a site using a .htaccess file.
If you still wish to be able to serve Google adsense on this page then the following example is good for this (yes the allow line should be changed to suit your needs)

# Google_ads agents
BrowserMatchNoCase Mediapartners-Google good_pass
BrowserMatchNoCase Adsbot-Google good_pass
<LIMIT GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.456.789
#Google ads
allow from env=good_pass
</LIMIT>

Posted in Web development | No Comments »

PHP: casting stdClass Object to a array

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

When using Soapclient to access a webservice the returned object will be of a stdClass Object.

If you don’t wish to access this as an object, but would find it easier to use it as an array then a quick cast solves this.

/*As an object*/
print_r($soapResult->contents);
/*cast to an array*/
$soapResult = (array)$soapResult;
print_r($soapResult['contents']);

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Posted in PHP5 | No Comments »

 at the top of the page (UTF-8 BOM)

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

These characters are the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard.

This can be solved in two ways:

  • Save the file without the BOM (some editors have this as an advanced option)
    • Using vi: 
       :set nobomb

      and then save the file

  • Make sure the right encoding is used to present the file (meta charset) / .htaccess or similar

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Posted in PHP5 | 1 Comment »

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