PHP

A common issue I have come across in the past is that I have a CMS system, or an old copy of Wordpress, and I need to create a set of keywords to be used in the meta keywords field. To solve this I put together a simple function that runs through a string and picks out the most commonly used words in that list as an array. This is currently set to be 10, but you can change that quite easily.

The first thing the function defines is a list of "stop" words. This is a list of words that occur quite a bit in English text and would therefore interfere with the outcome of the function. The function also uses a variant of the slug function to remove any odd characters that might be in the text.

Lazy instantiation (also known as lazy load) is an object orientated design pattern that attempts to reduce the amount of resources needed to load an application by only loading certain parts of it if they are needed. This makes sense as you don't need all parts of an application on every page load, so cutting down the data loaded cuts down the resources and processing time needed to load the page.

A good example of this might be when creating a student and courses application or similar. Obviously you would want to link students with their courses, but you don't want to have to load all of the students registered with a course when you are looking at a list of courses. Lazy instantiation allows you to only load the student information when it is called for.

To build this example we will first need a Student class.

There are a few URL shortening services about, of which bit.ly is just one. However, it does provide a nice API for developers to interact with the site. Not only is it possible to shorten URL's, you can also reverse them, find out information about the site and get information about how many people have used to link. The API requires you to create an account to interact with the API. Once you have created an account you can use the API service.

Download the bitly API interaction PHP class.

There are several functions available in this class but the main two are shorten() to turn a URL into its bit.ly equivalent and expand(), which will do the exact opposite.

To convert a URL into its bit.ly equivalent you can call the shorten() function like this.

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.

If you want to incorporate a W3C validation check into an application then you can use the following class. It uses file_get_contents() to get the contents of the file and then uses regular expressions to return either the number of errors or -1 is any errors occur. Of course if the document is valid the function will return 0.

TinyURL is a service where you can convert a long URL string to a really small one. For instance, the following URL, which points to the Googleplex on Google Maps.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=googleplex&sll=37.579413,-95.712891&sspn=34.512672,45.615234&ie=UTF8&cd=1&z=16

Can be converted to the following.

http://tinyurl.com/qpkor2

This is perfect for posting to Twitter or similar microblogging platforms as it saves lots of character space.

If you are constructing a simple string from a set of variables contained in an array then you can use the implode function to convert the array into a string. The implode() function takes two parameters. The first is the glue that is used to join the items in array together and the second is the array to use. Here is a trivial example of implode() in action.

$array = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6);
 
echo implode(',', $array);

This will print out the following:

1,2,3,4,5,6

The good thing about the implode() function is that it doesn't add stray commas to the start and end of the string so there is no need to alter the string after the function is used.

Following on from the post about starting and stopping MySQL using .bat files I decided to add commands to these files that also controlled Apache in the same way. This turned out to be a lot easier than trying to start and stop MySQL as the command line commands for httpd executable worked very well in .bat files.

So, to start Apache use the following line.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\httpd" -k start

And to stop the server use the following line.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\httpd" -k stop

The other day I needed to hide an image but keep the original image intact so rather than do complicated things with light and dark filters I decided the best way would be to pixelate the image. All that is required to pixelate an image is to shrink it down and then blow it up to the original size, thus reducing the quality of the image.

The following code will do this process for a jpeg image. The pixelate amount variable is used to reduce the width and height of the first image using division and then multiply them back again to the original values for the output image. Remember to change the ImageCreateFromJPEG() to the format you want.

Zend_Search_Lucene offers some powerful document scanning capabilities, and there are a few different formats that are useful for the search engine to index.

To allow the indexing and searching of Excel documents using Zend_Search_Lucene you need to use the Zend_Search_Lucene_Document_Xlsx class. However, to use this class you must have the Zip module installed with PHP. For Windows users this means editing your php.ini file and uncommenting the following line:

extension=php_zip.dll

For Linux users you will need to recompile PHP with the --enable-zip configure option.

Create and/or open the index in the normal way and you can index Excel documents using the following code.