Articles

Question

Write a PHP script that will print out the following text in the correct diamond shape.

    *
   ***
  *****
 *******
*********
*********
 *******
  *****
   ***
    *

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?

Question

What does the following snippet print and why?

I was lucky enough to pick up a couple of free books from the recent PHP Unconference Europe, one of which was Beginning Zend Framework by Armando Padilla. Having not looked into Zend Framework for a while I thought I would read the book to refresh my knowledge catch up and post a review.

The premise of the book was to create a sample application to keep track of music artist information, with each chapter building on the code from the previous. The first few chapters are about installing Apache, PHP and MySQL and some UML diagrams of the application that will be built. After reading this I was actually enthusiastic about the application and couldn't wait to get started.

Question

Given the following form:

<form action="index.php" method="post">
<input name="text" type="input" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" /> 
</form>

How would you get hold of the value of the input box after the form is submitted?

Views is an amazing module, but sometimes you can come across certain limitations that make life difficult. For example, I created a view that pulled in a bunch of nodes based on different taxonomy terms. The problem was that I had more than one taxonomy term in different vocabularies being used to filter the results, which essentially caused the same field in the term_data table to be used for both taxonomy filters. So, no matter what I changed the parameters to I always received no results. I did try and add the second term as an argument but it isn't possible to do LIKE matches with views arguments.

Question

Consider the following:

function doSomething(&$val) {
    $val++;
}

$a = 1;
doSomething($a);

What does the variable $a now equal?

Question

What does the following code snipped print?

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

I was helping my son out with his maths homework today and we came across a question that asked him to find some combinations of two numbers that added up to a given number (he is only 6 so this was good maths practice). This got me to thinking about how to calculate all possible ways in which two numbers could be added together to make another number.

The only rule had to be in there was that doing things like 1+11=12 and 11+1=12 are basically the same thing and so would be cheating. In which case I realised that it would only be necessary to use half of the numbers when creating the list, so for the number 12 every combination can be found using the numbers 0-6 because after this we start duplicating the sums, just swapping the order.

Here is the function I came up with.

Question

If I assign and print a value like this:

$a = 012;
print $a;

I get back a value of '10', why?