PHP

If you create classes in PHP then you should be unit testing them as much as you can. Setting up unit testing classes for your code can be time consuming and involve a bunch of copying and pasting. Thankfully, PHPUnit comes with a couple of helper functions that allow the creation of unit testing classes automatically, which can save a bit of copying and pasting.

As an example for this post I will use the following Spider class, which is part of some code I am working on at the moment to create a simple site spider in PHP.

I recently needed to create a function that would read and extract cookies from a Netscape HTTP cookie file. This file is generated by PHP when it runs CURL (with the appropriate options enabled) and can be used in subsequent CURL calls. This file can be read to see what cookies where created after CURL has finished running. As an example, this is the sort of file that might be created during a typical CURL call.

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html
# This file was generated by libcurl! Edit at your own risk.

www.example.com        FALSE        /        FALSE        1338534278        cookiename        value

The first few lines are comments and can therefore be ignored. The cookie data consists of the following items (in the order they appear in the file.

The tstamp task in Phing can be used to generate a timestamp that can be used anywhere within the current project. The default behaviour of tstamp is to create the properties DSTAMP, TSTAMP and TODAY, which contain time and date values. All you need to do is include the tstamp XML tag in your project somewhere.

<tstamp>
</tstamp>

The properties DSTAMP, TSTAMP and TODAY use the PHP strftime() function as a basis for formatting the time. The following table shows the value of each property.

Question

What does the $count variable equal after each of these loops?

Question

What does the following code do?

define("MY_CONSTANT", array(1,2,3,4,5));

Question

What is the difference between these two lines of code and can you produce the background code used for them?

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?

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?