Script School News

Create a query list of ID numbers from an array and put into a string.

$id_numbers = array(1,6,14,32,84,27,49,77);
$complist = join(”,”, $id_numbers);
$query = “SELECT id from tablename WHERE id IN($complist)”;

$test_string = ‘item 1, item 2, item 3, ‘;
$test_string = substr($test_string,0,-2);
echo($test_string); // returns “item 1, item 2, item 3″

$string = “?This is a test that should be in single quotes quotes?”;
$text = preg_replace(”/(\?([^\?]+)\?)/”,”‘\\2′”,$string);

regular expression produces:

‘This is a test that should be in single quotes’

The following will allow POST through PHP as if it was submitted from a form in a browser.

<?php
$host = ‘www.sitetopostto.com’; // domain only, no path info
$path = ‘/path/to/program.cgi’; // path to cgi, asp, php program
$user_agent = ”; // identify as your own user agent (like ‘MSIE’) if you want

$fp = fsockopen($host, 80);
fputs($fp, “POST $path HTTP/1.1\r\n”);
fputs($fp, “Host: $host\r\n”);
fputs($fp, “Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n”);
fputs($fp, “Content-length: ” . strlen($parameters) . “\r\n”);
if ($user_agent) {
fputs($fp, “User-Agent: $user_agent\r\n”);
}
fputs($fp, “Connection: close\r\n\r\n”);
fputs($fp, $parameters);

while (!feof($fp)) {
$data .= fgets($fp,128);
}
fclose($fp);

// (OPTIONALLY strip header returned (for XML response only), use $data otherwise
ereg(”<(.+)”,$data,$matched);
$without_header_data = ‘<’ . $matched[1];
?>

To get the output of a parsed file (without printing to the screen):

<?
// Grab output of file
ob_start();
include(”parsed_file.php”);
$test_data = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

// Write to a new file if you like
if($fh = fopen(”new_file.html”, “w”)){
  fputs($fh, $test_data);
  fclose($fh);
}
?>

Very basic XML parser example using PHP and the ‘–with-xml’ option.

<?php
$parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($parser,$xml,&$structure,&$index);
xml_parser_free($parser);
$i = 0;
foreach($structure as $s) {
if($s[”level”] == 2) {
// load results into $res variable
$res[$i] = $s[”value”];
$i++;
}
}
?>

##
The example above gets the level 2 value. You can do a var_dump($structure) to get the entire document/node structure.

I came across this great REGEX calculator

/* web convert date to unix_timestamp: www.4webhelp.net/us/timestamp.php */

One can create their own unix_timestamp converter using mktime() function.

// subtract old timestamp
$t_sec = time() - 1102971600;

/*
divide #seconds by 60 for minutes
divide #of minutes by 60 for hours
divide #of hours by 24 for days
use floor to get integer for day
*/
$t_day = floor(($t_sec / 60) / 60 / 24);

Example.

// redirects a user to scriptschool.com
header(”Location: http://www.scriptschool.com/”);

Also see PHP course I, week #8.

A little earlier I posted on MakeYouGoHmm but you can see below that we’re going to start
adding Code snippets to be added to Script School News:

From time to time myself, and a few other folks are going to start posting small code snippets to serve as real world examples of how to use built-in functions, variables, arrays, DB connectivity, etc in PHP and other scripting languages at the Script School News blog.

I’m excited about using this to help sharing. If you’d like to get involved and share your own original snippets demoing small uses of functions for various coding languages and databases, then please drop me an email at principal at scriptschool.com and I’ll get you an author account.

Here’s a few snippets for Wordpress 1.5 to grab the post ID and post_date inside The Loop:

$post_id = $post->ID; // returns ‘13′
$post_date = $post->post_date; // returns ‘2005-03-18 12:13′