Communication over sockets involves 2 programs running on the same machine or on separate machines across a network. First is a socket server and the other is a socket client. Tcp stands for Transmission control protocol and it is the most common protocol being used for most of the network communication that takes place over… Read More »
SOAP and PHP SOAP is a protocol to exchange objects over http. It is used to implement apis and the data being exchanged is in xml format. Sometimes it might be required to modify the soap request to add custom http headers for example. Since SoapClient is a class, it can be extended and the… Read More »
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 »
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 »
Socket Programming Socket programming involves connecting to remote machines on LAN or over the internet using ip addresses and port number. For example google.com has an ip “173.194.36.3” and runs http server on port 80. So a socket application can connect to that ip address on that particular port number and start data communication. Socket… Read More »
In your web application you might need to parse the user’s user-agent string to find out the browser/OS/device being used. This is necessary specially when your webapp tries to adapt to the user’s platform in a better way. For example a different layout for mobile device or restricted features/graceful degradation on a non supporting browser…. Read More »
The filter_var function of php is capable of validating many things like emails, urls, ip addresses etc. It does not have a direct option to validate a domain name however. So I coded up this little snippet that the filter_var function with a little tweak so that it can validate domain names as well. function… Read More »
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 »
Adsense Management API The google adsense management api can be used to fetch adsense reports inside a web or desktop application. In this article we are going to see how to use the api in python to fetch the earnings. The documentation is available here. The code shown here is build using the samples. Setup… Read More »
Html to pdf If your php application needs to generate some kind of pdf report then the simplest approach would be to generate the report as an html and then convert it to pdf using some library. Plenty of libraries are available that can convert html to pdf in php. To name a few -… Read More »