The idea behind serializing a variable is to create a storable string format of it, such that the same variable can be recreated later when required using the string. 1. serialize and unserialize These are the traditional functions to serialize and unserialize data in PHP. $a = array('a' => 'Apple' ,'b' => 'banana' , 'c'… Read More »
Github Login Github has become a very popular social login on websites related to programming and development. Github itself is a big storehouse of opensource projects and community of developers. Github oAuth documentation can be found at http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/. Register website with Github oAuth The first thing to do would be to register your website with… Read More »
Yahoo OpenId In the previous article, we learned how to integrate . Its good to know that Yahoo is also an openid provider and “Login with Yahoo” can be added to a website in a very similar manner. Yahoo’s openid discovery url is http://me.yahoo.com/. The rest of the code is very simple. Code <?php /*… Read More »
OpenId A very popular login method now a days is to allow users to login through their google, openid etc accounts. One popular protocol being used is the OpenId. According to wikipedia : OpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to… Read More »
Clientside certificates are often used in soap webservices. For example the wsdl file link might require a clientside certificate. The server throws an error like this : HTTP Error 403.7 – Forbidden: SSL client certificate is required. Curl Command To use clientside certificate with curl , test the following command curl –cert certificate_file.pem https://www.example.com/some_protected_page or… Read More »
Localisation Localisation involves changing various parts of application output like display of dates , time , numbers , language etc according to the standards of the geographical region of a user. Localisation is an important feature of applications that targets users across the globe and not just one region. So here are a set of… Read More »
Part 2 26. Avoid direct SQL query , abstract it $query = "INSERT INTO users(name , email , address , phone) VALUES('$name' , '$email' , '$address' , '$phone')"; $db->query($query); //call to mysqli_query() The above is the simplest way way of writing sql queries and interacting with databases for operations like INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE etc. But… Read More »
Part 1 11. Do not gzip output in your application , make apache do that Thinking of using ob_gzhandler ? No dont do that. It doesnt make sense. Php is supposed to write your application. Dont worry about how to optimise data transfer between server and browser inside Php. Use apache mod_gzip/mod_deflate to compress content… Read More »
Php is used to write web applications which are online and publicly accessible. Therefore security is a fundamental necessity of these applications to keep the data safe and free from unauthorized access. Below are a bunch of simple tips/hacks/ideas to design your php applications to have better security. The Code 1. Avoid short tags If… Read More »
In this series we are going to look into some useful tips and techniques that can be used to improve and optimise your php code. Note that these php tips are meant for beginners and not those who are already using mvc frameworks etc. The Techniques 1. Do not use relative paths , instead define… Read More »
On linux , the list of locales installed on the system can be fetched through the terminal command locale -a : $ locale -a C C.UTF-8 en_AG en_AG.utf8 en_AU.utf8 en_BW.utf8 en_CA.utf8 en_DK.utf8 en_GB.utf8 en_HK.utf8 en_IE.utf8 en_IN en_IN.utf8 en_NG en_NG.utf8 en_NZ.utf8 en_PH.utf8 en_SG.utf8 en_US.utf8 en_ZA.utf8 en_ZM en_ZM.utf8 en_ZW.utf8 es_AR.utf8 es_BO.utf8 es_CL.utf8 es_CO.utf8 es_CR.utf8 es_DO.utf8 es_EC.utf8 es_ES.utf8… Read More »
This is a small script written in php that can fetch the whois information of an ip address from regional internet registries (RIR). Useful in finding information about ip address.
MPDF Many php applications need to create pdf of documents like invoice , receipt and even id card etc. In this article we shall create a pdf invoice using the mpdf pdf creation library. Mpdf is made in php without any other external library. Mpdf parses css much better than any other free pdf libraries… Read More »
Php functions like zip_open return an error number if they fail. To get the corresponding error message from the error number , use the following function. function zip_error_message($errno) { // using constant name as a string to make this function PHP4 compatible $zipFileFunctionsErrors = array( 'ZIPARCHIVE::ER_MULTIDISK' => 'Multi-disk zip archives not supported.', 'ZIPARCHIVE::ER_RENAME' => 'Renaming… Read More »
When a browser makes a request to a php script, the browser sends some http headers which can look like this : Host: localhost Connection: keep-alive User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*;q=0.5 Cookie: username=admin; password=21232ffc3; PHPSESSID=o5m4e2td1m66c4pkjdag9vs0u2 The php script under request ,… Read More »
In this tutorial, I am going to show you a simple way to write a Hit Counter script in PHP to save and display the number of visits to your website. We will basically store and increment the hits in a file, that can be used to display the total hit count as well. The… Read More »
In many php applications there are multiple tasks that need to be run via cron at different times. In a typical application you may be doing the following tasks via cronjobs : 1. Backup database. 2. Send out email to subscribers. 3. Clear temporary files. 4. Fetch xml feeds from some source and store them… Read More »
desktop:~$ php -a Interactive shell php > echo time(); 1319362432 php > Above is an example of a given timestamp. And a cron schedule can look like this 0 5 * * * – which means run everyday at 5 hours and 0 minutes. Now in a php application you may need to test if… Read More »
Resizing images Web applications often need to work with images like pictures of users or photos etc. So the need to resize images comes up when creating thumbnails for example or compressing images for storage. The default library to handle image operations in php is GD. It can be used to resize images. GD vs… Read More »
System load System load is a measure of how busy the system is running the processes. Higher system load simply means more processes are running and more are waiting to be run. When coding php applications, it sometimes is useful or necessary to find the current load on the server/system. For example if you want… Read More »