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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.

I was sent an email the other day that contained some text were the start and end letter of each word were left alone, but the middle of each word was randomized. The weird part was that the text was still readable, which is due to the way in which the brain processes words.

I wondered if I could replicate this using a PHP script. All I would need to do is split apart the sentence into the component words and loop through those words, randomizing the middle of them. Clearly, it is not possible to mix up the order of letters in a word less than four characters long so a check would be needed for this. This is what I cam up with:

There might be many instances where you will create a program in PHP that takes a URL as input and does something with the address. This might be a site analysis or an image resize, but whatever the use is, you need to be sure that the URL will work or at least has the same format.

What users tend to leave out of a URL string is the http:// bit at the start. You could validate the URL to force the user to do this, but you will end up annoying a few people. By far the best way of making sure that the URL has the http:// bit at the start is by adding it behind the scenes. The best way to this is to remove the http:// from the start of the string, even if it isn't there and then add it back on.

Sending multiple arguments to a function can be done using a parameter string. This is just like a URL that has data encoded into it. For example, if you wanted to send two parameters (called parameter1 and parameter2) to a function then you would use the following string.

parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2

To use this in the function you create the function as normal with a single parameter. This single parameter is the string that will contain all of your arguments.

function test($arguments)
{
}

You must run the parse_str() function on the arguments parameter to extract the data you need. You can then call the parameters by their names as variables.

Here are a few of the built in JavaScript functions available.

To get the length of a string use the length variable. This returns the number of characters in a string.

var str = 'abcdef';
str.length; // returns 6

The charAt function will return the character at the point specified in the parameter. So to get the first character of a string use:

var str = 'abcdef';
str.charAt(0); // returns a

To get the last character of a string use a combination of charAt and length.

var str = 'abcdef';
str.charAt(str.length - 1); // returns 'f'

To get the position of a character or group of characters in a string use the indexOf function. The function returns -1 if the string is not found.