#! code

I was testing out a new Drupal project build and found this strange error when uploading files to nodes using the Upload module. This error produced a lot of warning messages that appeared on the screen (in the process alarming my project manager) but apeared to have no impact on the actual function of the module, or the file uploaded. Essentially, when a file was uploaded the following errors were produced.

Question

The following code was executed.

<?php
class MyClass {
  private $foo = "bar";
}

$myObject = new MyClass();
echo $myObject;

Which produced the following error.

Catchable fatal error: Object of class MyClass could not be converted to string in test.php on line 7

Call Stack:
    0.0011     323736   1. {main}() /test.php:0

How can the code be simply changed to prevent this error and produce some form of result?

If you have a large page or form that uses validation on it then you will probably want to tell the user that something is going on. One way to do this is by telling the user at the top of the page that something has gone wrong and then letting them figure out where.

A more elegant solution is to scroll the page down the just above the first error message so that the user is aware of what they need to fill in. This can easily be done through a combination of jQuery and the ScrollTo plugin.

There are numerous ways to print out dates and times, and many hours of programming are spent in converting dates from one format to another.

To do this in MySQL you use the STR_TO_DATE() function, which has two parameters. The first parameter is the time to be parsed and the second is the format of that time. Here is a simple example that converts one date format to a MySQL formatted date string.

SELECT STR_TO_DATE('[21/Apr/2009:07:14:50 +0100]', '[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%i:%S +0100]');

This outputs 2009-04-21 07:14:50.

One useful function of any application is to report on any errors that occurred. Zend Framework comes with a nice error controller system that you can activate by creating an ErrorController class.

The following is an ErrorController class that I use. It detects what sort of error occurred and displays a message to the user. It will also email a detailed report of the error to the server admins.

In my last post I talked about the PHP CodeSniffer, so today I thought I would solve a common problem that doesn't seem to have any documentation. Whilst correcting a class file I had there was this one warning that just wouldn't go away.