#! code

Question

What does the following code snipped print?

$a = 5;
$b = 'a';
print $$b;

A simple way to convert a string into a set of variables is through the use of the explode() and list() functions. list() is a language construct (not really a function) that will convert an array into a list of variables. For example, to convert a simple array into a set of variables do the following:

The usual practice when checking for the return value of functions is to run the function and store the value in a variable, and then test that variable. Here is an example of that process using the strstr() function.

$string = 'abcde';
$var = strstr($string, 'f');
if ( false !==  $var ) {
    var_dump($var);
} else {
    var_dump($var);
}

This code will output "bool(false)" as that was the return value of the strstr() function.

To redirect from HTTPS to HTTP on the home page only using the following rule.

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^/?$ http://%{SERVER_NAME}/ [R=301,L]

The variable %{HTTPS} will be either "on" or "off" and will be enabled even if SSL is not installed on your site. The rule above sees that HTTPS is on and redirects the home page to the HTTP version. You can even chain lots of rules together like this.

If you followed the tutorial on installing PHPDoc then you are probably wondering how to get started actually writing the documentation. PHPDoc will parse all the files given to it and look for comment blocks, it will then use these blocks to create the documentation for your application. A valid PHPDoc comment block must start with a '/**', have a '*' on every line and finish with '*/'.

Displaying the size of a file in bytes is all well and good, but means little to most people so converting the size into something a little more readable is a must. The following function will take the number of bytes that a file is and convert it into something a little more meaningful. Rather than just convert the value into kilobytes it returns the largest denomination of size. So if your file is greater than 1073741824 bytes the function will return your value in gigabytes.