Category Archives: Php Snippets

Php code snippets and examples

Php – Fix “Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding” error when loading xml

By | March 26, 2013

When loading xml files in php through simplexml_load_string or domDocument class, sometimes an error like this might popup Warning: DOMDocument::loadXML(): Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! OR Warning: simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line 93: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! The error occurs when the xml has some invalid characters… Read More »

Php – How to fetch gzipped content over HTTP with file_get_contents

By | January 13, 2023

The file_get_contents function is often used to quickly fetch a http url or resource. Usage is very simple and appears like this $content = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/'); However the file_get_contents does not get the contents compressed. It requests the server to send everything in plain text format. Most websites are capable of serving compressed content, if they… Read More »

How to download a file using Curl in PHP – Code Snippet

By | January 13, 2023

Download a File using Curl Here is a quick curl snippet for php, that can download a remote file and save it. <?php set_time_limit(0); // File to save the contents to $fp = fopen ('files2.tar', 'w+'); $url = "http://localhost/files.tar"; // Here is the file we are downloading, replace spaces with %20 $ch = curl_init(str_replace(" ","%20",$url));… Read More »

How to extract tar.gz archives in Php

By | May 1, 2023

In a previous article we learned how to . Now lets do the reverse, that is extract tar.gz archives and get the files out. The code to extract a tar.gz archive is very simple and uses PharData class. Here is an example // decompress from gz $p = new PharData('files.tar.gz'); $p->decompress(); // creates files.tar //… Read More »

Generate a dropdown list of timezones in php

By | February 14, 2018

Applications often allow users to select their timezones for reporting the proper time properly. Here is a quick function that can be used to generate a dropdown list of timezones that is easy to read and understand. &lt;?php function get_timezones() { $o = array(); $t_zones = timezone_identifiers_list(); foreach($t_zones as $a) { $t = ''; try… Read More »

Php array of iso 639-1 language codes and names

By | September 2, 2023

Here is a php array containing the language codes and language names as specified by the iso 639-1 standard. Useful when . <?php /** ISO 639-1 Language Codes Useful in Locale analysis References : 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes 2. http://blog.xoundboy.com/?p=235 */ $language_codes = array( 'en' => 'English' , 'aa' => 'Afar' , 'ab' => 'Abkhazian' , 'af'… Read More »

PHP redirect – go back to previous page

By | September 1, 2023

To go back to the previous page the superglobal variable $_SERVER can be used. $_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] has the link to the previous page. So to redirect simply : // Method to go to previous page function goback() { header("Location: {$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']}"); exit; } goback();

Php – parse text and convert urls into hyperlinks

By | May 10, 2020

The following function will parse a given text and convert all the urls into links. It does this using regular expressions. It converts email addresses to mailto links as well. Code function parse_links($str) { $str = str_replace('www.', 'http://www.', $str); $str = preg_replace('|http://([a-zA-Z0-9-./]+)|', '&lt;a href=&quot;http://$1&quot;&gt;$1&lt;/a&gt;', $str); $str = preg_replace('/(([a-z0-9+_-]+)(.[a-z0-9+_-]+)*@([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})/', '&lt;a href=&quot;mailto:$1&quot;&gt;$1&lt;/a&gt;', $str); return $str; }