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 »
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 »
Php applications might need to do some image processing if they are allowing users to upload pictures of somekind. This can include cropping, watermarking, compressing etc. To compress an image the quality needs to be adjusted. Here is a code example of how to do it: function compress_image($src, $dest , $quality) { $info = getimagesize($src);… Read More »
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 »
Tar is a common archive format used on linux. Alone it is just an archiving format, that is it can only pack multiple files together but not compress them. When combined with gzip or bzip2 files are compressed as well. Then it becomes a .tar.gz which is actually a gzip compressed tar file. Php has… Read More »
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. <?php function get_timezones() { $o = array(); $t_zones = timezone_identifiers_list(); foreach($t_zones as $a) { $t = ''; try… Read More »
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 */ $language_codes = array( 'en' => 'English' , 'aa' => 'Afar' , 'ab' => 'Abkhazian' , 'af'… Read More »
Text templates are often used to generate content like notification emails, invoices filled with the details of a customer or user. The best example would be a bulk email program that sends out emails to multiple users filling the details of the particular user in every individual mail. Text templates have place holders for fields… Read More »
The DomDocument class in php can be used to parse html/xml content and build objects that can be queried using standard functions to extract values. The following functions are quite useful: getElementsByTagName – Get all elements under a node that match a tagname getNamedItem – Get element with a particular “name=” attribute. Useful to find… Read More »
Scraper scripts often need to extract all links on a given page. This can be done in a number of ways like regex, domdocument etc. Here is simple code snippet to do this using domdocument. /* Function to get all links on a certain url using the DomDocument */ function get_links($link) { //return array $ret… Read More »
Often numbers are to be written with a proper suffix, like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 15th, 21st and so on. So here is a quick function to do the same for a number. Technique 1 /* This function will add st, nd, rd, th to the end of numbers */ function ordinal($i) { $l = substr($i,-1);… Read More »
Like any other language php applications often need to execute system commands like they are run from the terminal/console/commandline. Php has multiple functions to do this task. Lets take a look at each of these 1. system “system() is just like the C version of the function in that it executes the given command and… Read More »
The getimagesize function of php provides lot of information about an image file , including its type. The type can be used to check if the file is a valid image file or not. To check if a file is an image or not, use the function function is_image($path) { $a = getimagesize($path); $image_type =… Read More »
If a file is to be saved in at path /var/www/a/b/c/d/abc.zip where the directory c and d dont exist then the directories have to created. Here is a function that uses recursion to check for directories in a path and create them if they do not exist : /** Make a nested path , creating… Read More »
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();
The numerical system used in India differs from the Western system in terms of the placement of the thousands separator. Example : Number -> 1000000 Indian System -> 10,00,000 (Ten Lakh) Western System -> 1,000,000 (1 Million) While echoing numbers in PHP it is possible to format numbers with such separators using functions like number_format…. Read More »
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-./]+)|', '<a href="http://$1">$1</a>', $str); $str = preg_replace('/(([a-z0-9+_-]+)(.[a-z0-9+_-]+)*@([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})/', '<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>', $str); return $str; }