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Use the following array to print out a list of Australian states.

$australian_states = array(
    "NSW" => "New South Wales",
    "VIC" => "Victoria",
    "QLD" => "Queensland",
    "TAS" => "Tasmania",
    "SA" => "South Australia",
    "WA" => "Western Australia",
    "NT" => "Northern Territory",
    "ACT" => "Australian Capital Territory"
);

Use the following array to print out a list of Canadian states, also know as provinces.

$canadian_states = array( 
    "BC" => "British Columbia", 
    "ON" => "Ontario", 
    "NL" => "Newfoundland and Labrador", 
    "NS" => "Nova Scotia", 
    "PE" => "Prince Edward Island", 
    "NB" => "New Brunswick", 
    "QC" => "Quebec", 
    "MB" => "Manitoba", 
    "SK" => "Saskatchewan", 
    "AB" => "Alberta", 
    "NT" => "Northwest Territories", 
    "NU" => "Nunavut",
    "YT" => "Yukon Territory"
);

Here is the same array, but with the French versions of the states.

Use the following array if you want to print out a list of USA states either as a list, or as a select box.

Net_Ping is a PHP wrapper for the ping program and provides a neat way pinging a host or checking if a site is up and running. To install it you just need to have pear installed. Once that is done you can do a search for PEAR Net_Ping by opening a terminal and typing:

> ping search ping

This will return the following:

Retrieving data...0%.MATCHED PACKAGES, CHANNEL PEAR.PHP.NET:
=======================================
PACKAGE           STABLE/(LATEST) LOCAL
Net_Ping          2.4.4 (stable)        Execute ping
Services_Pingback 0.2.2 (alpha)         A Pingback User-Agent class.

You can install Net_Ping by running the following:

> pear install Net_Ping

Which should produce the following output.

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.

Using this function is quite intuitive and means that you can convert between time formats very easily. Here are a few more examples of this function.

Apache can be set up to log all sorts of information. As of Apache 2.2 the basic log file format that a fresh install of Apache will produce will have the following format:

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b

Which doesn't mean a lot to the uninitiated, so here is a short explanation of each.

If you have a site with parts of it using SSL, but want to turn it off for mundane pages like the blog section then use the following code. This uses the $_SERVER['HTTPS'] variable to see if HTTPS is turned on, if it is then a header is issued and the page redirected.

if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on') {
    $url = "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    header('Location: ' . $url, true, 301);
    exit();
}

You can turn it back on again on your secure pages using the opposite.

if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'on') {
    $url = "https://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    header('Location: ' . $url, true, 301);
    exit();
}

Don't include both of these scripts on the same page or you will break the site! Also, make sure that no headers have been issued before hand as this code can cause a "headers already issued" error.

Converting an array of information into a string is easy, but when you are doing this for insertion into a database having trailing commas is going to mess up your SQL statements.

Take the following example, which takes an array of values and converts them into a string of values. This practice is quite common in PHP database manipulation.

$values = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five');
$string = '';
 
foreach ( $values as $val ) {
    $string .= '"'.$val.'", ';
}
 
echo $string; // prints "one", "two", "three", "four", "five",

Obviously we need to strip the trailing comma from the end of this string. To do this you can use the following function.

I had the need to create a time selecting component for a form, but I didn't want to have lots of extra components. After a little bit of searching about I found the following JQuery UI plugin called timepicker.

This plugin will take a input box as the argument and will add three selection boxes for hours, minutes and seconds. It will then hide the original input box.

However, there were two things that I needed that this plugin didn't do. The first is that it was in a 12 hour format and the second is that the plugin didn't have a second selection. So I decided to adapt that plugin in order to incorporate these things.

Here is the modified plugin.