PHP

I'm always writing bits of script to test things out and I thought that I would start making a record of them in case I need them in the future. This is a little script that will loop through the contents of a text file and validate that a bunch of 301 redirects point to the place they are meant to point to. This script assumes that the redirects are already in place on the server, but this is what I was testing. Here the format of the redirects text file.

http://www.exmaple.com/old_page http://www.exmaple.com/new_page 
http://www.exmaple.com/nother_old_page http://www.exmaple.com/another_new_page 

The script below loads in this file and loops through it using the PHP function get_headers() to test that the first URL redirects to the second. If any problems are found then the line number and the problem is reported on.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

In any list of documents in a system it is a good idea to add some thumbnails of the document so that your users can get a quick overview of what a document looks like before downloading it. This is a good alternative to just displaying an icon of the document type.

Creating Word document icons is very simple thanks to a service called LiveDocx. LiveDocx was created as a web service to allow the easy creation of most document formats from a simple template. However, it is possible to send a normal Word document as the template file and get an image of the file in return.

The best way to use LiveDocx with PHP is to use the LiveDocx class contained within Zend Framework. You can use this outside of a Zend Framework application by including the file Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge.php at the top of your script.

To desaturate an image means to remove all non-greyscale colours from it, essentially creating a black and white version. To do this you can use the function imagecopymergegray(), which is part of the GD image library. This function is a little difficult to figure out, but what is does is sample one image into another and optionally changing the amount of colours that are kept during the sampling process. The function can be made to sample just a section of the image, or the whole thing. The parameters of the function are as follows.

The Login Destination module is a neat little module that allows site admins to customize where the user will be sent to when they login. It provides a few of different ways of customizing, including a PHP snippet box that allows fine grained control.

What I needed to do on a recent project was to change the login destination for a single user role, but redirect everyone else to their user profile page. This required the use of the PHP snippet box. In order to get access to the current user object I had to include it into the scope of the PHP snippet code by using the following.

The FlashMessenger in Zend Framework has a bit of an odd name as it has nothing to do with Adobe Flash at all. It is a controller action helper defined in the class Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_FlashMessenger, which is used to store and retrive messages that are temporarily stored in the user's session. This is useful if you want to provide form validation and redirection at the same time as you can print out messages after the page has been loaded. If you are familiar with Drupal then this class acts in the same kind of way as the drupal_set_messages() function.

Because FlashMessenger is an action helper it can be initialized in a number of different ways, however, using the _helper property (the helper broker) of the controller is probably the easiest way. The FlashMessenger can be retrived through the helper broker in the following ways:

Question Take the following HTML form.

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.

Question

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