The alpha release of PHP5.4 came out about a month ago. Along with the release came an announcement containing several of the more important changes, but not much in the way of detail. Here is a quick explanation of the changes highlighted in the announcement:
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This function can be used to retrieve the host name for a particular IP address. For example, if you give it the IP address 74.207.242.169 it will output tinsology.net.
Just off of the top of my head, one potential use for this function might be to check IP logs for content scrapers. Say for example I’m running a bot on my server that is visiting your site, retrieving your content, and then publishing it on my site. If you wrote a script that looked up the host name for each IP address in your access log you would find my domain in the list. From there you can block the IP address.
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I had actually never heard of this function before my random function grabber spit it out, or for that matter any of the ctype functions. What this function does is takes a value and determines if it consists entirely of digits. At first this sounds a lot like is_int, but there are a couple of differences worth noting:
Starting this week I’m going to be writing a post about a particular PHP function. Each week a function will be chosen at random from php.net’s Function List and I’ll write about (including but not limited to) basic usage, interest ways to use the function, portability issues and alternatives, and caveats.
I’ve written a script that will grab a function and I’m going to try my best to write about the function it spits out, however there are going to be some exceptions to this. For one, if the function is very straight forward or just plain boring I’m going to grab another function. For instance, no one wants to read a post about the ceil function. It rounds up. End of post.
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The following is a non-comprehensive list (in no particular order) of things I often see people doing while using PHP that they probably shouldn’t. The purpose of this list is to inform; hopefully it will shed some light on what some people may be doing wrong and what they can do better. I doubt there is a PHP programmer out there that hasn’t been guilty of some of these things at some point, so if you find that you are doing several or even all of these things it is nothing to be ashamed of.
The number of APIs and other remote services that either support or require json as a means for transferring data is growing. However, PHP does not have guaranteed support for json encoding or decoding functions until version 5.2, which means if you want your application to be as portable as possible you’ll need to find an alternative. The following functions should provide that. Note that I haven’t exhaustively tested either of these functions and they may not completely replicate all of the functionality of their built in counterparts, but they should be sufficient for basic usage:
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Reading in remote content with PHP can be an incredibly simple task:
$url = 'http://example.com/foo.php?bar=1'; $remote_content = file_get_contents($url);
One problem with the above solution is that it requires allow_url_fopen to be enabled in your php.ini. If you’re writing a portable application that depends on being able to fetch remote content you probably don’t want to tell your users to modify their php.ini. Doing so would mean turning away users who don’t have access to their php.ini (as is the case with some shared hosts). Ideally you would want a solution that offers some redundancy.
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This is a function that I find myself using more and more often to create or modify URLs that contain a query string:
function build_query($params = array(), $keep_get = true, $unset = null)
{
if($keep_get)
{
$params = array_merge($_GET, $params);
if(is_array($unset))
{
foreach($unset as $key)
unset($params[$key]);
}
}
return http_build_query($params);
}
Every now and then I discover something that makes me feel like I’ve been doing things the hard way. The feeling is an interesting combination of excitement and embarrassment. I experienced this today while browsing PHP documentation. I discovered two function that will make my life a lot easier in the future: debug_backtrace and debug_print_backtrace. As someone who has written his fair share of Java, I’m very accustomed to stack traces. The fact I’ve made it as far as I have with PHP without them leaves me feeling amazed. The fact that I’ve had access to them all along leaves me feeling ashamed.
I guess you learn something new everyday.
A new version of Apparatus is available. Previously I wrote about several new features that would be included in this version, however rather than further postpone a release, I’ve decided to hold off on those features until the next version. Version 0.4 incorporates a new theme, the latest version of tab override (which should resolve any browser compatibility issues), and various improvements and modifications.