Re: [PHP] Is it better to return a multi-array, or an array of objects?
On 4/03/2006 3:10 PM, Daevid Vincent wrote: I'm building a fairly large project. I've been trying to follow best practices, but I'm a bit worried about performance. Using PHP 5.1 and mySQL 5.0. I have product and company classes. So when a user does a search of the database, is it better/faster/etc. to return just a two dimensional associative array to populate an HTML table of the results like: product name, product id, price, company name, company phone, etc. (assume I'm only showing some of the total number of fields). [snip] One observation: you shouldn't return all fields in a recordset unless you *need* all of the fields in a recordset. The majority of the time, you should be explicitly stating which fields to retrieve in your SQL statement, as in: SELECT field1, field2, field8 FROM mytable WHERE whatever as opposed to: SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE whatever Some of the time, yes, that will mean you're explicitly typing out 7 field names from a table that only has 8 field names, but getting out of the habit of using *, particularly if you expect your application to work well under heavy loads, will save you resources, which will increase your app's overall performance. It may be you're already doing this, but it wasn't clear from your post. Much warmth, planetthoughtful --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Mysql Rows
On 4/03/2006 2:49 PM, benifactor wrote: thank you. the table does have and id feild that auto increments, however if you delete a user there will be a gap between the users between which would not be what is not acurate enough. thank you for you help. simple fix. i should have caught it. - Original Message - From: Anthony Ettinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: benifactor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: php php-general@lists.php.net Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 3:52 PM Subject: Re: [PHP] Mysql Rows define $1 = 0 outside your loop. i'm curious why you are relying on row-order in the database? Typically you'd have a PRIMARY KEY auto_increment for something like this. I have to agree with Anthony - why are you using row order to determine something relating to users? I couldn't follow your brief explanation above, and the fact that you're doing it sets off some soft alarm bells about the design of your application. Why is it important that there shouldn't be any 'gaps' between users? Because you want to know how many users there are? If so, simply do a SELECT COUNT(*) on the table whenever / wherever you need to know. If you're using it for IDs for the users, it's generally a bad idea to reuse this type of information. If you have some other purpose, I'm extremely curious about what it might be. Much warmth, planetthoughtful --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Mysql Rows
I have to agree with Anthony - why are you using row order to determine something relating to users? I couldn't follow your brief explanation above, and the fact that you're doing it sets off some soft alarm bells about the design of your application. Why is it important that there shouldn't be any 'gaps' between users? Because you want to know how many users there are? If so, simply do a SELECT COUNT(*) on the table whenever / wherever you need to know. If you're using it for IDs for the users, it's generally a bad idea to reuse this type of information. If you have some other purpose, I'm extremely curious about what it might be. What I was getting at is you get the unique id for the username (if you allow username changes, then you want a unique key to do your joins on from other tables). Yep, that's one good reason among many for using unique ids. Thinking a little about the OP's question, I could understand row order being relevant in certain situations where you wanted to display something like, You were the 432nd person to register at our site!, etc. But, too often I've seen people new to database design not liking 'gaps' because 'user1' will have a unique id of '1', while 'user2' will have a unique id of '6' because the records associated with unique ids '2' through '5' were deleted during testing, and so on. So, they feel that 'user2' should have a unique id of '2', ignoring the fact that that's not a unique id at all, if you had id '2' associated with another record at some point. I'm not suggesting this is what the OP is doing, just that that's why I was curious about the purpose. Much warmth, planetthoughtful --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Mysql Rows
On 4/03/2006 5:36 PM, Anthony Ettinger wrote: Yep, that's one good reason among many for using unique ids. Thinking a little about the OP's question, I could understand row order being relevant in certain situations where you wanted to display something like, You were the 432nd person to register at our site!, etc. I'd do this with a timestamp, and then sorting by date and doing a count() on the results. But then again that's just me. I remember the days where i'd clear a database after testing to keep the auto_increment inline, but eventually, you will get out of sync on that, so it's not a reliable way of keeping a numerical sequence. Right, or you could just as easily do the same sort and WHERE clause by your unique id, but even just doing a count, you're interested in the fact that the record is at position whatever in that recordset, so 'row order' is relevant and, in that context, meaningful. Much warmth, planetthoughtful --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] how to learn php
On 11/02/2006 10:10 AM, /dev/null wrote: hello i have been trying to learn php. what is the best approach to learning php for someone who has no programming experience? i am very familiar with html, xhtml, and css. i'm not an idiot when it comes to using computers. i have bought several books and have subscribed to a couple of the php mailing lists, but i feel that i could be doing more to learn php. what approach (and steps) did you take in learning this really cool scripting language? should i look into taking classes or stick with an autodidact approach? any advice and/or opinions would be greatly appreciated. thanks. I honestly believe the best way to learn any programming language, aside from perhaps tertiary study (and then only perhaps), is to start out with a project and ask the questions you need to solve as you build that project. It should quickly become obvious which things you need to learn, as you plan and pursue the project. Some of those questions might be: - I need to access data in a database. How do I do that? - I need to be able to carry data from one page to another, how do I do that? - I need to be able to store 'stuff' at one point in a page (ie, maybe data I got from the database) so I can use it again at another point in the page. And so on. Armed with those questions, you can go through your books, go through helpful web sites (don't underestimate the quality of the docs and comments on php.net) and ask questions in forums like this one. Another useful way of picking up knowledge that might not be relevant to you right now, but will probably be handy to know later, is reading threads in this mailing list. That way you learn about the kinds of problems others have encountered, and the suggestions for solving them they have received. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org Urban legends, superstitions, ghost stories and folklore http://www.ulblog.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Redirect from /rss.xml to /rss/rss.xml
Hi All, This may turn out to be more of an apache question (but I'm hoping there are some apache experts on the list as well), but I'm wondering how I would go about automatically redirecting requests for /rss.xml to read the contents of /rss/rss.xml instead? Any help appreciated! Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought http://www.planetthoughtful.org Urban legends, superstitions, ghost stories and folklore http://www.ulblog.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Preparing site content for RSS XML feed
Hi All, I currently generate a simple rss.xml file for syndication from my site, containing nothing more than the subject of the post and a link to the article on my site. I'd like to syndicate the the actual content of each of the posts, but as I understand it RSS / XML is somewhat demanding in what it expects of how various html entities are treated etc? I don't suppose, by any chance, that there are any PHP tools that can be easily factored in to a process to take content that would include normal HTML (ie DIV and SPAN tags, links, TABLEs etc)? Failing that, does anyone know of a good guide on what steps need to be taken to create a valid RSS feed where the content contains HTML? Any help appreciated! Much warmth, Murray -- Lost in thought :- http://www.planetthoughtful.org A blog devoted to urban legends, superstitions, ghost stories, and all things folkloric. :- http://www.ulblog.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] CR \ LFs being represented as ascii characters in output of mail()
Hi All,
I'm having an odd problem with formatting of line feeds in an email my
site automatically sends to me when someone comments on one of my blog
entries.
For some reason \r\n characters are coming through exactly like that
in the email, and yet the same value being stored in the backend MySQL
database seems to represent the carriage-return \ line-feed characters
as it should.
A typical example of the value when sent in the email would be:
Lol, hi Duncan.\r\n\r\nIt\'s possible that this post once had some comments. I
lost most of PT at one point when my host had a harddrive crash, and salvaged a
lot of entries from local copies on my computer, and notes I\'d scribbled in my
journals and so on.\r\n\r\nStill, it\'s great to see you commenting on the post
that made you a legend on PT!\r\n\r\nMuch warmth,\r\n\r\nMr Banderas
The odd thing is that the rest of the email is correctly interpreting
line-feed characters, it's only the value entered on the comment form
that represents CR \ LFs as normal characters.
I'm not sure if this is the culprit, but because my remote host for this
site has magic_quotes_gpc on, and my local setup doesn't, I run the
following function every time a page is requested where form processing
is performed:
function traverse ( $arr )
{
if ( !is_array ( $arr ) )
return;
foreach ( $arr as $key = $val )
is_array ( $arr[$key] ) ? traverse ( $arr[$key] ) : (
$arr[$key] = stripslashes ( $arr[$key] ) );
}
Can anyone give me any thoughts on how to represent these CR \ LF
characters properly in the email?
Many thanks,
Murray
--
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[PHP] date(H, $datevalue) always adds an hour?
Hi All, Wondering if anyone can help me work out why date(H) always adds an hour? I'm *assuming* it thinks it should be compensating for Daylight Saving Time (though I'd be just as willing to believe that it's caused by something else), however we don't observe DST in Queensland, Australia. Making matters a little more complex, while my local machine shouldn't be compensating for DST (if that's what's happening), my remote machine (based in Florida somewhere, I think) should, when applicable. So, just to explain a little better. Let's say the clock on my computer reads 7:00pm. If I do echo date(H); it will output 20, instead of 19. The same thing happens if I take a date value from my mysql database. $sql = SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(datecreated) AS unx_date FROM mytable; $rs = mysql_query($sql); $row = mysql_fetch_object($rs); echo date(H, $row-unx_date); If the above record contained the value '2006-01-10 19:00', the code would output 20 instead of 19. Can anyone help me figure out how to accommodate for this? Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] date(H, $datevalue) always adds an hour?
On 20/01/2006 8:39 PM, David Grant wrote: Murray, What do you get if you print date(T)? David Hi David, I get EST, which I assume is Eastern Savings Time? If that's the case, any idea where I change this value so that it only affects my local machine? Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] date(H, $datevalue) always adds an hour?
On 20/01/2006 8:48 PM, David Grant wrote: Murray, As far as I know, Queensland is in EST (Eastern Standard Time), so that is the correct value. Are you using the same machine or is it remote? David Hi David, I'm currently working entirely on my local (Queensland) machine. The remote machine only becomes an issue when I'm finished putting the site together. Thanks for giving this some thought... Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Template engine that doesn't rely on PEAR?
Hi All, Can anyone recommend a PHP 4.x compliant template engine that doesn't depend on PEAR? I can't get PEAR to operate properly on my remote host, so I'm looking for something that can be dropped in to an existing site and is complete in and of itself. Any recommendations that suit the above would be very welcome! Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] What software do you use for writing PHP?
Jim Moseby wrote: man you guys are wimps.. gvim on windows... :) Pt'Edit' in DOS. ;) (Pt * 2) 'edlin' in DOS. :) Infinitely recursive pfft A pencil and a piece of paper and ringing people to describe the cool web site you've just drawn, -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] No forums?
Richard Davey wrote: I agree 99% with you, the majority are (excuse my French) utter shite. *but* the code quality, features and stability of the excellent FUD Forum thankfully doesn't fall into the camp you describe. While I don't use it myself, you only need to take a quick look at the code and who's involved with it to recognise its quality. Hmmm, thank you for mentioning this forum, I wasn't previously aware of it. I know phpBB has been criticized previously for behind-the-scenes code quality, though it seems like a fairly mature online forum package while using it. Any thoughts on a comparison between the 2? Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Line breaks in mail function?
Hi All, I'm building a site on a new web host and am currently working on feedback forms. I'm using the mail() function to send the feedback to the destination mail account, and I'm having problems getting the body of the email to line break. I've tried constructing the body with both \n\n and \r\n\r\n terminating lines where I want line breaks to appear, but both return an email with the body in one long string showing the actual \n\n or \r\n\r\n characters, as opposed to interpreting them as line breaks. Example code: $body = 'From: ' . $name . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'Email:' . $email . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'IP Address: ' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'Feedback:\r\n\r\n'; $body .= $feedback; mail([EMAIL PROTECTED], Feedback, $body, From: $email\r\nReply-To: $email\r\nX-Mailer: PHP/ . phpversion()); As I said above, I've also tried using \n\n instead of \r\n\r\n. Can anyone give me some advive on how to get the linebreak characters interpreted as linebreaks? Many thanks and much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Line breaks in mail function?
Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote: On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 12:20 +1000, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful wrote: Example code: $body = 'From: ' . $name . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'Email:' . $email . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'IP Address: ' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . '\r\n\r\n'; $body .= 'Feedback:\r\n\r\n'; $body .= $feedback; mail([EMAIL PROTECTED], Feedback, $body, From: $email\r\nReply-To: $email\r\nX-Mailer: PHP/ . phpversion()); As I said above, I've also tried using \n\n instead of \r\n\r\n. Can anyone give me some advive on how to get the linebreak characters interpreted as linebreaks? Use double quotes around the parts that have \r and \n characters if you want them to be interpreted. Ah, damn you Jasper, I should have noticed that myself. Don't you hate it when you've been staring at code too long to notice the obvious? Thank you! Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Unsubscribing from several PHP lists
Hi All, Does anyone know of a way to unsubscribe an email address from the PHP email lists when you can't send a reply to the confirmation email? My host for my currently subscribed email address has an issue with its SSL certificate which means that I can't send replies from that account (which has gone on for months and I've given up on waiting for it to be resolved). For this reason, I'm swapping my subscriptions over to another email account through a different host, but of course the reason why I'm subscribing from another account is also the reason why I can't reply to confirm the unsubscription from the 'broken' account. Any help appreciated. Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Handling competing edits in a wiki engine?
Terence wrote: Murray @ PlanetThoughtful wrote: Hi All, I've recently been working on building my own wiki engine for my blog site. While the majority of the engine is complete, a remaining concern I have is how to handle competing edits (ie when two or more people are editing the same wiki page simultaneously). I'm wondering if anyone else on the list has given this some thought? How would / do you handle competing edits to the same entry in a wiki application? We use a combination of locking the record using a simple boolean column together with the user id who has locked the item and the timestamp. The locking prevents another user from opening the form and happily editing away without realising his changes will be lost when he presses submit. The user id is to inform the second user who has opened the document, and the timestemp is so that the first guy doesnt open the document and go out for lunch leaving it locked. We default it to 5 minutes after which someone else can open the document and edit it. I think I'm going to go with Jasper's suggestion, re: simply timestamping the current edit from the preceding version and testing that timestamp against the existence of more recent edits and throwing back to the user a request to resolve their changes against the now 'current' version. I had been thinking about a timed locking strategy (5 minutes seems short, though, for content creation, and what do you currently do when person A comes back from lunch, person B has made an edit in the same entry after person A's lock timed out, and person A commits their now aged edit? Do you basically throw an error anyway, and ask person A to resolve?), and perhaps implementing a simple javascript countdown on the page to alert the person editing the page when time for their edit is running out, but in all honesty I think throwing back the error, and perhaps presenting a diff of the newer version of the entry, and the version the user has edited, might be the way to go. Either way, gives me plenty to think about. Out of curiosity, does anyone know if it's possible to tell whether an individual session is still alive from PHP? I don't mean from within code being run for a particular user, but in code that, for example, might be executed by a cron job, which would examine a table in which session ids have been recorded automatically for each visitor, and determining which of those sessions are still theoretically alive? I suspect this isn't possible, but I've also learned to never underestimate the ingenuity of those faced with things that aren't possible. Much warmth, Murrray @ PlanetThoughftul --- A man, a canoe, and a dream to climb Mt Everest... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Handling competing edits in a wiki engine?
Hi All, I've recently been working on building my own wiki engine for my blog site. While the majority of the engine is complete, a remaining concern I have is how to handle competing edits (ie when two or more people are editing the same wiki page simultaneously). I'm wondering if anyone else on the list has given this some thought? How would / do you handle competing edits to the same entry in a wiki application? Just to add a little extra information: all 'edits' are in fact 'inserts'. Entries are stored in a mysql table. The engine simply displays the most recent record for the entry being viewed. This is, of course, to allow for retrieval of an historical version of the entry should one or more entries be vandalized. Much warmth, Murrray @ PlanetThoughftul --- A man, a canoe, and a dream to climb Mt Everest... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Regex Help
Hi, folks. I'm having trouble with a simple regex. I'm sure it's just something small that I'm missing but nothing I'm trying is working. In an HTML file I have comments like this: !-- START PRINT -- various html crap here !-- END PRINT -- Here's the regex I'm using: /!-- START PRINT --(.*?)!-- END PRINT --/ And then the call to preg_match_all(): preg_match_all($printable_reg, $str, $out); It's been quite a while since I've worked with regular expressions so I'm not sure what the problem is. The regex isn't throwing errors, it's just not matching the content located between the start print and end print comments. Can anyone lend a hand or give some advice? Hi Pablo, At a (reasonable) guess, I'd say it's because you're not using the s pattern modifier in your preg_match_all()? The s modifier forces your regular expression to match new lines with the . metacharacter. Try: preg_match_all(/!-- START PRINT --(.*?)!-- END PRINT --/s, $str, $out); http://php.planetmirror.com/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php Hope this helps. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] serialize
murray... it may have been helpful to the guy to also give him an idea of your tbl structure. i think you're talking about something like: tbl schema EvalTBL -id -UserID -ScoreTypeID ScoreTBL -id -ScoreType table ScoreType could/would have as many different categorites as required. table EvalType would have a scoreTypeID (from the ScoreTBL) for each userID. each user could have multiple scoreTypes in the EvalTBL... Hi bruce, That would have been an even more normalized representation of the table(s), yes. For the purposes of demonstrating a state of normalization that still allowed the OP to maintain a single table, my structure in that post was: Scores -ScoredThingID -scoretype -score I would personally have implemented a structure similar to the one you outlined, but posted with the idea of first things first. That's why I included a link to a tutorial on normalization and suggested Googling on the topic as well, for further reading. Still and all, it's helpful of you to clarify. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] PCRE false match with preg_match?
I recently encountered a strange behaviour, could someone please countercheck it, to either tell me there is an error in my pattern? I have a test string: 7005-N/52 I have two match patterns:a) /([0-9]*)\/(.*)/i b) /([0-9]*)\-(.*)/i I check the test string with the help of preg_match, and they both matched, but normally variant a) shouldn't have matched. Normally I test my patterns with the tool The Regex Coach, and according to this tool it shouldn't have matched. PHP version is 5.0.4, PCRE extension version is 4.5 01-December-2003 Hi Jens Your first pattern 'matches' because it finds a hit on the /52 component of your test string. If you look at the pattern itself, it's because you're using the 'zero-or-more-occurrences' quantifier (ie *) in the first part of your pattern: ([0-9]*). It's a valid hit, because there are zero incidences of numeric characters immediately prior to the /52 component of the test string. Changing the * to a + (at least one or more occurrences) could 'fix' that pattern (ie so that it doesn't match your string), depending on any other values being tested by it. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] serialize
Sent this to [EMAIL PROTECTED] but forgot to copy php-general...
heh. Here it is again.
I would use a table such as
Table
|_UserData
Then use objects per user to store the data.
class User {
var TestScore;
var ScoreType;
...
var Vars;
function __construct($TestScore, $ScoreType) {
$this-TestScore = $TestScore;
$this-ScoreType = $ScoreType;
}
function __sleep() {
$this-Vars = get_object_variables($this);
}
...
function ListVars() {
$MyString = ;
ForEach($this-Vars as $key = $value) {
$MyString .= ${key}: ${value}\n;
}
Return $MyString;
}
}
$Joe = new User(WhateverScore, WhateverType);
$sJoe = Serialize($Joe);
...Store it...
...Recall it...
(Variable result = recieved serialized version of $Joe)
$Joe = unserialize($Result);
$Results = $Joe-ListVars();
Hi Jake,
I guess this comes down to preference, but I personally simply couldn't
bring myself to store serialized objects in a table in the way you're
describing.
A well-designed database should not only be normalized, but should also be
agnostic of the technology being used to access it.
I don't know enough about whether or not serialize() is a widely implemented
language construct, but I have worked on enough projects where someone in
management has said, Hey, I know you've done all this work in PHP (or
insert language here), but we've decided we want to rework it in (insert
other language which someone read a glowing article about on some website)
to shudder at the thought of storing data in a database that perhaps only
one language can access.
It also implies more coding to perform relatively simple recordset
operations such as give me the average of 'score12' across all things being
scored, etc. Lastly, it locks your DBA (assuming you have one) out of being
able to perform granular updates should the need arise. It's for pretty much
the same reason that I hide under my desk, whimpering, when someone
inevitably suggests storing XML recordsets as XML documents in database
fields.
So, full marks for fully exploiting the potential of objects, but you'll
have to excuse me while I go make a coffee and maybe go for a brisk walk to
get over the case of heebie-jeebies this suggestion gave me. ;-)
Much warmth,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Optimal Regex?
I need to catch all instances of a coordinate in a give string. So far I have this, which only works if the coordinate is in a certain format. $string = (334,-53.44),(111,222); $expression = '([(][-]?[0-9]*[.0-9]*?,[-]?[0-9]*[.0-9]*?[)])'; preg_match_all($expression, $string, $matches); This returns the correct strings (334,-53.44) and (111,222), but I'd like all formats to work. Like (111, 222), ( 111 , 222 ), (111, 222 ), etc, etc. How would I change my regex to accomplish this? Hi David, Someone else may have a more direct answer (ie a tweak of your regex that accounts for the possibilities that you've mentioned) but looking at your email I immediately had a concern over etc, etc. Regular expressions rely very much on you being able to predict the different possible cases you will be dealing with. Looking at the examples you provided, it looks like you're (currently?) concerned with anomalous spaces in your string. A simple way of dealing with these would be to do: $string = str_replace( , , $string); ...before you attempt your regex match. This will remove all spaces from the string, making it fit a more predictable pattern (one that your current regex matches). If, however, there are other possible anomalous characters you need to take into account, it would be much more helpful if you could supply examples of them. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Optimal Regex?
Wow, that definitely works. I would sort of like to know how to tweak the regex, but maybe this is the best way of doing it. Is [0-9]*[.0-9]*? the best way of looking for a number with decimals? Hi David, Just to answer this question, I would probably use something like the following pattern to match a number with optional decimals: -?([\d]+)?(\.[\d]+)? In and of itself, the pattern you have above will only match numeric digits. So, with a string of 23.99, it would match the 23 and the 99 as separate matches. Basically this happens because you have the 'lazy' quantifier (ie ?) after the zero-or-more-occurrences quantifier (*), and the laziest iteration of [.0-9]*? is to match nothing. A small improvement can be made by putting () around the [.0-9]* part of the pattern, thus: ([.0-9]*)? This now becomes the optional quantifier, indicating that the pattern between () can be matched *if it exists*. This still isn't perfect, however, since the modified [0-9]*([.0-9]*)? will not only match a number like 29.33 in it's entirety, it will also match 129..3..57 in its entirety. This is because you include the period (.) within the character class, so it can be matched zero-or-more times as well as the digits. Moving the period (.) outside the character class so that the regex only attempts to find an optional single instance of it between two sets of numbers (where the second set of numbers is also optional) makes another improvement. [0-9]*(\.[0-9]*)? Note that I've escaped the period, because otherwise it would be interpreted as meaning any single character. This should now work pretty much as you expect it to. My version adds the ability to match both positive and negative numbers with decimals. It also uses the shorthand character class for numeric digits (\d). Hope this is of some help. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] serialize
I have an app that stores evaluation scores so I have 30+ values all
within a certain range, currently in the db, each of these values has
it's own column:
Table test
id
user_id
motivation
caring
personal_characteristics
creativity,
...etc.
If the client decides they want to trap more characteristics, it
requires changes to the table structure and the table quickly gets
large with 30+ columns. I was thinking of just compacting all of
these down to one column and then using serialize/unserialize and
storing an array of the test scoresis this the best way??
Hi,
This has less to do with PHP (though it will impact on your code) and more
to do with database design principles.
From what you describe, you have a denormalized table. Ie, every score value
has its own field for each thing being scored:
Id, score1, score2, score3, score4..., score30
, 23, 18, 12, 36, 38
1112, 45, 12, 62, 25, 73
A more normalized representation of that table would be:
Id, scoretype, score
, 'score1', 23
, 'score2', 18
, 'score3', 12
, 'score4', 36
, 'score30', 38
1112, 'score1', 45
1112, 'score2', 12
1112, 'score3', 62
1112, 'score4', 25
1112, 'score30', 73
Adding a new score type for each id is then as simple as inserting rows for
the ids with a new 'scoretype' value, meaning that no change of the actual
table structure is required.
To retrieve the scores for any given id in your PHP code, you'd do something
like:
$sql = SELECT scoretype, score FROM scores WHERE id=;
$rs = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($rs)){
$scores[$row-scoretype] = $row-score;
}
mysql_free_result($rs);
print_r($scores);
It might be helpful to you to Google on the topic of database normalization.
Here's a link from the MySQL site that gives a brief introduction to the
topic.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html
Hope this helps.
Much warmth,
Murray
---
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RE: [PHP] basic user/input form questions... more validation!
-Original Message- From: bruce [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 23 September 2005 10:23 AM To: 'Jasper Bryant-Greene'; php-general@lists.php.net Subject: RE: [PHP] basic user/input form questions... more validation! one more question/issue... the mysql_real_escape function escapes with a'\' which works for mysql, but isn't standard ansi... is there another function that does the same thing, but uses the ansi standard '. also, if there is another function, does it also work with mysql?? The important thing here is that escaping with a \ is MySQL's standard for escaping, so should be used when using MySQL as your storage backend. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: email validation (no regex)
What you have is virtually impossible to determine if all legitimate possibilities are covered. email validation using regex is a very heavily analyzed subject Google regex email validate and you'll find loads of expressions. Look at the Zend article, it provides some insight. I fully understand about the almost limitless possibilities. Googling the subject returns results more mind boggling than the regex itself. :o) Do ANY of the regex examples you have found cover all those possibilities? If so, why are there so many different approaches? For most applications, where you will only be validating a small number of emails in a given day, why put yourself to all the regex pain, still to not have covered all the possibilities? In the end, with regards to email validation, all most people need is to know that a given email has a proper username, just 1 '@' in the middle, and a valid domain. If it doesn't, its a bogus email address. As to that, why not validate the email address by sending an automated message to the supplied account, requiring the person to click on a validation link? Easy, simple, works better than either method currently being discussed, purely for its simplicity, if nothing else. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: email validation (no regex)
because you should want/need to validate that the address is correct prior to determining if the email server is up running... the regex function simply allows you to quickly determine if the address is valid... doens't mean that it's going to go to an actual live user...!! btw simply checking for a single '@' with a domain doesn't do it... what if the user has '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' or '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. will your regex accept/deny this??? welcome to the world of email validation -bruce As to that, why not validate the email address by sending an automated message to the supplied account, requiring the person to click on a validation link? Easy, simple, works better than either method currently being discussed, purely for its simplicity, if nothing else. I agree, so basic validation is A Good Thing. However, the most desirable form of validation would have to be, can I send a legitimate email to that account and receive acknowledgement that it's working by having the user click on a validation link. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: email validation (no regex)
because you should want/need to validate that the address is correct prior to determining if the email server is up running... the regex function simply allows you to quickly determine if the address is valid... doens't mean that it's going to go to an actual live user...!! btw simply checking for a single '@' with a domain doesn't do it... what if the user has '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' or '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. will your regex accept/deny this??? welcome to the world of email validation -bruce As to that, why not validate the email address by sending an automated message to the supplied account, requiring the person to click on a validation link? Easy, simple, works better than either method currently being discussed, purely for its simplicity, if nothing else. I agree, so basic validation is A Good Thing. However, the most desirable form of validation would have to be, can I send a legitimate email to that account and receive acknowledgement that it's working by having the user click on a validation link. After all, for all the regex / interrogation you perform, you still can't be certain that the user entered an account *they own*. See? Sending a validation email is *also* A Good Thing! Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Suggestions for class design
on 09/19/2005 02:33 PM Chris W. Parker said the following: Let's take for example a class called 'Customer' that (obviously) manipulates customers in the database. Here is a very basic Customer class. (Data validation and the like are left out for brevity.) This is a basic object persistence problem. (Unless I've already got some major design flaws I think we should be good to go.) Where I get tripped up is when I realize I'll need to at some point get more than one customer at a time and thus I want to add a method called 'get_customers()'. Yes, there is a problem. You are trying to retrieve objects into memory before they exist. It makes more sense that you retrieve objects using a factory class. That is the approach of Metastorage. You may want to take a looka at Metastorage before you reinvent the wheel. Hi Manuel, I very much understand your desire to promote your various projects, but the original poster is asking a question that is basic to any programmer's development in object-oriented coding. Once he understands how to solve class abstraction problems such as the one he is asking about, he will be better equipped to deal with a wider range of application development tasks. This is not to trivialize your Metastorage project (or, to be more accurate, I know nothing about it, so it's not my place to trivialize it or otherwise), but to point out that 'out-of-the-box' solutions to fundamental coding development problems probably ultimately makes for a poorer programmer. I could well be wrong, but it seems this is a case of give a man a fish as opposed to teach a man to fish. Also, and separate from above, I don't understand the relevance of your comment, You are trying to retrieve objects into memory before they exist. Unless I'm horribly mistaken [1], the original poster has developed a class that abstracts a single customer, and is asking the list for suggestions in how to best approach a need to be able to abstract collections of customers. This is a normal application development issue, and for the life of me I can't grasp how your comment relates. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org [1] And it wouldn't be the first time! -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Tidying code for PHP5.0.5/PHP4.4.0
Jochem Maas wrote: Michael Sims wrote: So, as far as foo() knows: foo($a = 5); and foo(5); are exactly the same... I don't think they are, and you're examples don't prove it. Anyone care to come up with the proof. No, I was wrong, Rasmus corrected me. That's my one allowed mistake for the day. I promise to wait until tomorrow before making another one. ;) Who was it that said, If you find that you only made one mistake today, you weren't looking hard enough? Oh, that's right, it was me. ;) Off to make more mistakes... Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Suggestions for class design
[snippage] I do not understand why this could bother you or anybody else. If you have a better solution, nothing stops you to make your recommendations. Hi Manuel, I did make my recommendation. To you. It went something like (and I'm paraphrasing), Your proposed solution doesn't solve the original poster's conceptual problem with abstracting classes that deal with collections of objects in conjunction with classes that abstract single objects. In other words, and I realize I'm stretching out on a limb with this metaphor, I saw in your post an attempt to treat the symptoms without offering a cure for the disease. Actually, that really is a terrible metaphor. I'm certain I'll think of a better one about 3 seconds after I hit 'send'. Isn't that always the way? And your perception of bias may or may not be accurate. I don't recall delivering wrath-of-god denunciation of your suggestion to use a project you developed, just acknowledged a desire to promote a project you're probably (and perhaps justifiably) proud of. You say that wasn't a component of your recommendation. I'm willing to accept that, not that I expect you to be losing any sleep over whether or not I believe you. This is a reality of expressing opinions on a public list: others are free to disagree with you. See Michael Sims' response to the same post you're addressing here. He makes some great points and I for one am glad he had an opportunity to make them in response and counterpoint to a post I made. His thoughts enrich the list, as do yours, and as, I hope, do mine. This is not to trivialize your Metastorage project (or, to be more accurate, I know nothing about it, so it's not my place to trivialize it or otherwise), but to point out that 'out-of-the-box' solutions to fundamental coding development problems probably ultimately makes for a poorer programmer. I could well be wrong, but it seems this is a case of give a man a fish as opposed to teach a man to fish. I think you should have learned about Metastorage first before commenting. It is not really a out-of-the-box solution. It is a code generator tool that employs well known design patterns to generate code to customized to the developer needs. At some point I just may do that. It's an interesting concept, if nothing else. My comments remain relevant, however, regardless of my knowledge of your project. At least, and this is important, that's my opinion. Also, and separate from above, I don't understand the relevance of your comment, You are trying to retrieve objects into memory before they exist. Unless I'm horribly mistaken [1], the original poster has developed a class that abstracts a single customer, and is asking the list for suggestions in how to best approach a need to be able to abstract collections of customers. This is a normal application development issue, and for the life of me I can't grasp how your comment relates. I tried to explain in the part of the message that you did not quote, why using a factory class as entry point, which is my suggestion, it makes more sense. Thank you for the extra explanation. I still don't understand the comment's relevancy to the actual question being asked by the original poster, but I will explain, in case it's of interest, why that comment caused me some confusion: - The original poster outlined that he had created a class that represented a customer. - He told the list he was having difficulties with the concept of abstracting a collection of customers - He received some helpful suggestions from the list about how to approach that task - None of which would have meant he was 'trying to retrieve objects into memory before they exist.' I don't know about anyone else, but what that comment implied to me was that the original poster was attempting to instantiate a class as an object before including the file that contained the class definition. I may well have misunderstood what you meant by your comment, but it still stands out as not being relevant to the problem the original poster was describing. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Suggestions for class design
This is not to trivialize your Metastorage project (or, to be more accurate, I know nothing about it, so it's not my place to trivialize it or otherwise), but to point out that 'out-of-the-box' solutions to fundamental coding development problems probably ultimately makes for a poorer programmer. I could well be wrong, but it seems this is a case of give a man a fish as opposed to teach a man to fish. I see your point, but I'm not so sure I agree fully. Manuel suggested Metastorage (which makes sense, it's his project and he's most familiar/comfortable with it), I suggested Propel because that is what I've used. I think we both suggested existing ORM's for the same reason... namely that properly implementing a full featured ORM is an extremely difficult thing to get right. I don't know anything about Chris's skill as a programmer, but he's bound to reinvent the wheel several times over, and poorly to boot. I believe that implementing an ORM is one of those things that you cannot fully understand and appreciate until you've tried to do it and failed. IMHO it's only after you've built one that you realize what you really need, and by then it needs to be rebuilt. It's kind of like Fred Brook's plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow, or at least it was for me. Hi Michael, You've hit on a point that I implied in my original post, but should have been more explicit about. If I can add some emphasis: * IMHO it's only after you've built one that you realize what you really need * I couldn't agree more. As I read and understand the original poster's question, he is still in the 'building one' phase of his development as an OO PHP coder. If this wasn't the case, I doubt he'd be asking the question he asked. My post was not aimed at saying 'using packaged approaches to solve coding problems is bad', but to say 'the original poster is asking a fundamental learning question, so a packaged approach will possibly, maybe even probably, hamper his development as a programmer at this point.' Put another way, working out how to implement a class to handle the question he asked would not be incredibly challenging, particularly with the help and advice of people on this list, and would add to his understanding of how OO works generically and in PHP. Both very good things. I use several package solutions in my own projects. Notably, MDB2 and HTML_QuickForm. I use MDB2 because it means my projects can be more flexible to any decisions made to change the backend storage technology. I use HTML_QuickForm because it provides convenient methods to building forms, and it minimizes the mixture of HTML and PHP code in my pages, something I personally prefer. Having said which, before adopting either of these packages I was satisfied that I understood how to achieve the same results using nothing more than my own coding skills. In other words, as a programmer I am comfortable working directly with a variety of data storage backends, employing classes to abstract different collections of data objects. I am comfortable building, validating, and processing forms. The packages I use are for convenience, rather than placing me at arm's length to understanding the programming concepts and needs they address. Also, I don't disagree that there are some brilliant packages out there, written by people who've taken time to learn more about a specific problem or set of problems than the average programmer would have to spend, particularly across the broad range of coding demands an application may touch upon. Again I reiterate: using packages to address application needs is not a bad thing, while avoiding learning the basics of programming by using such packages almost certainly is, particularly if you're taking your development as a programmer seriously, and consider yourself to be aiming at becoming a 'professional' programmer. [here there be snippage] My point is, I had implemented my own home grown ORM about 3-4 times, and while each one was much better than the one that preceded it, I still wasn't quite all the way towards a 100% general implementation. That's when I found Propel. It got so many things right that I hadn't figured out how to solve, as well as implementing things that I hadn't even considered yet. Now, you could argue that going through all those iterations and refactoring my own ORM helped me to improve my skills as a programmer, and you would be right. That's where I agree with you, somewhat. :) However, I was many many iterations away from improving my ORM to the point where it would be as useful as Propel (and that's assuming it would ever be that useful). The guys who developed it (and I'm sure the same goes for Manuel and Metastorage) concentrated on making the best general purpose ORM they could make. IOW their whole goal was to build an ORM, while my goal each time was to develop one for the purposes of finishing whatever real project I
RE: [PHP] html forms in php
Good day all, I have a problem for you all.. I have a form that has has the ability to delete a lot of information from my MySQL database. I would like to create a bit of security, in case the user hits the button by accident. I would like to create an additionnal window that would appear that would ask: Are you sure? and then a yes and no buttons to confirm the deletion or to cancel the command. Any thougts?? Hi Phil, You can achieve this in several ways. One would be to use a JavaScript onClick event on the 'dangerous' button to pop up a dialog with your 'Are you sure?' prompt and the yes/no buttons. If the user clicks on the 'no' button, you use JavaScript to cancel the page submission. If they click on the 'yes' button, the page submits. This approach would mean assuming that your users have JavaScript enabled. A second approach would be to have an intermediary page between the page with the button, and the page that performs the actual delete. The intermediary page would be little more than another form with the yes/no buttons. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Modifying data in forms with values
I have to create registration forms all the time for people in the office and what I keep running into is that I need a way for when they edit a field that the drop-down list of choices is automatically set for the right now. I have 100+ counties in one list, but I don't want to write 100+ if statements for checking to see if the value of $county equals the value of the field I am drop down choice. Anyone have some quick solutions? I have radio buttons as well, but going to use a drop-down list for the editing pages to make it all simple. Hi Robert, As a suggestion, why not put your counties in an array (are you taking them from a recordset? If so, same idea applies) and use foreach() to iterate through the array, building the select list. When $county equals the current value of the array, include SELECTED in the select HTML you are building. One if statement should handle the situation nicely. Much warmth, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] error message while mysqling on php
I have received an error: Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/www/mksystem.net when trying to execute $num = mysql_num_rows($result); Please go to http://mksystem.net/phpinfo.php and tell me whether it is due to the version of php I have on server and an easy workaround would be appreciated. Check the syntax of your SQL statement, it's very possible you have an error in it somewhere. If you have PHPMyAdmin, or some other interface to MySQL such as MySQL Query Browser, etc, try executing the SQL statement in one of them directly, to see if they return a valid resultset. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] setting 'expiry date'
I have a php/mysql database with articles. What I need is a php sctipt that will compare the current day with the 'expiry date' entered by the user and if the there is a difference then drop it from the database.. I retrieve the date (called time and format it like this... $query= SELECT DATE_FORMAT(time, '%d.%m.%Y') AS time, article, id FROM news ORDER BY id DESC; The expiry date is entered through a javascript widget and is in the format dd/mm/. Hi Ross, Is there a real reason for deleting the articles? Why not only display articles where the current date/time is less than the expiration date/time? Once the current date/time is greater than the expiration date/time, stop displaying the article. Same effect as far as your users are concerned, and you're not faced with the frustration of, 'I need a copy of that article from 12 months ago!' Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Opinion Request - No PHP content - Versioning Systems
Hey, I'm about to implement a versioning system here, and was going to go with CVS, but being that I haven't used it in almost two years I was wondering what y'all think? Opinions on the best, user-friendly (Mac Geeks will be using it), etc? Thanks. Hi John, I only have experience with CVS and Subversion, but of the two, I *much* prefer Subversion. Could be a purely subjective thing, but it's worth looking into all the same. http://subversion.tigris.org/ Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] searching through a mysql db/tbl
hi... i'm trying to figure out how to approach/solve a few issues. looking through google hasn't made the light shine!! 1) i'm trying to figure out how to allow a user to search through a query/tbl for a given string. ie, if i have the following as the result of a query: name email foo... aa [EMAIL PROTECTED] b1 [EMAIL PROTECTED]123 bb [EMAIL PROTECTED]qwe if i allow a user to search on say 'aa', i'd like the user to be able to get: name email foo... aa [EMAIL PROTECTED] b1 [EMAIL PROTECTED]123 any ideas as to how i could go about and create the query, or what would i need to do to have this result... Hi, Basically what you need to do is dynamically create the WHERE clause of your query string. In the example above, the WHERE clause might look something like: $qry = SELECT * FROM table WHERE name LIKE '%$searchterm%' OR email LIKE '%$searchterm%'; If you want to span the search across more fields, simply add them as extra OR elements to the WHERE clause. 2) if i have a query that produces a number of rows, how/what would i need to do, to limit the number of rows displayed, and to allow the user to select a 'back/next' button that would generate/display the next 'N' items in the list/query results... if anybody could direct me to sample docs/code that kind of describes/solves what i've described, i'd appreciate it!!! Here I'm making the assumption that you're using MySQL. If that's the case, you need to familiarize yourself with the LIMIT clause. This allows you to specify a starting point and number of rows to return for the resultset. So, using the query above again: $qry = SELECT * FROM table WHERE name LIKE '%$searchterm%' OR email LIKE '%$searchterm%' LIMIT 0,10; ...will return the first 10 results from your query (records 0 to 9). Note that the 'first' row is at position 0 in the recordset. Also note: if there are less than 10 records returned by your query (ie in your example, only 2 match your pseudo request), only those records will be returned. Then, issuing: $qry = SELECT * FROM table WHERE name LIKE '%$searchterm%' OR email LIKE '%$searchterm%' LIMIT 9,10; ...will return the next 10 results from your query (records 10 to 19), and so on. This requires you to pass some variables from one search result page to the next, particularly the variable that indicates where the 'next' results should begin, allowing you to factor that in when building the LIMIT clause of the query string for the search results that should be displayed on that page. A Google search on PHP pagination or PHP paginate should return a number of online resources explaining how to paginate results returned from a db query in PHP. Hope this helps. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] RE: PHP wiki recommendations
I'm not a Wiki expert, but have been using TikiWiki for a while and very much like it. It does everything you say with the possible exception of CSS. It may very well support CSS, I just don't need it so haven't investigated. It also allows for the use of templates that can be applied globally or by each user (these may be the CSS bit, again, I just haven't played). User logins can be pre-assigned or user driven so you can control who does what. I think you can turn on/off the CamelCase feature. Doug -Original Message- From: Murray @ PlanetThoughtful [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 2:03 AM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: PHP wiki recommendations Hi All, I want to add a wiki to my blog site to help create a knowledgebase of the characters, localities, stories I write to make it easier for new visitors to delve into the areas that interest them. I've been experimenting with a couple of different wiki packages, but am always interested in others' thoughts and recommendations. In particular, I've looked at MediaWiki and PmWiki. Of the two, I like MediaWiki's 'completeness', but it's also quite slow and doesn't strike me as being particularly (or easily?) customizable. PmWiki is probably my current candidate, but again I'd like to make sure I'm not missing a more obvious choice. My shopping list for the ideal wiki application is: - wiki entries preferably stored in MySQL tables. I'm not adamant about this (eg PmWiki uses files rather than a db backend), but it would suit my purposes better to be able to draw from the wiki tables from the front page of my blog to show lists of recently added and recently updated wiki entries - non-reliance on CamelCase wiki links. Many of my characters etc use joined CamelCase names (eg KillFork and DangerSpoon), and to avoid confusion I'd rather explicitly define links to wiki content - ability to categorize wiki entries - ability to compare history of wiki edits and easily reinstate older edits if wiki pages get 'graffiti'd' - ability to allow others to edit / create wiki entries, thru a user id / password system, so that regulars who would like to participate can do so - ability to customize presentation of wiki pages, presumably through CSS etc, so that I can maintain the 'look and feel' of my blog thru the wiki content - PHP based, though my host does run Perl, so if the killer wiki app is a Perl-based one, I'm sure I can muddle thru implementing it If anyone has any recommendations for other wiki applications I should look at before making a decision, I'd love to hear from you! Hi Doug, Thanks for the recommendation -- I did take a brief glance at TikiWiki, but my original impression was that it was too CMS-heavy for my needs. Given your recommendation, though, I'll take another look at it, and will probably download it and play around with it on my local machine. If anyone else has any other recommendations, I'm still very open to suggestions! Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] PHP wiki recommendations
Hi All, I want to add a wiki to my blog site to help create a knowledgebase of the characters, localities, stories I write to make it easier for new visitors to delve into the areas that interest them. I've been experimenting with a couple of different wiki packages, but am always interested in others' thoughts and recommendations. In particular, I've looked at MediaWiki and PmWiki. Of the two, I like MediaWiki's 'completeness', but it's also quite slow and doesn't strike me as being particularly (or easily?) customizable. PmWiki is probably my current candidate, but again I'd like to make sure I'm not missing a more obvious choice. My shopping list for the ideal wiki application is: - wiki entries preferably stored in MySQL tables. I'm not adamant about this (eg PmWiki uses files rather than a db backend), but it would suit my purposes better to be able to draw from the wiki tables from the front page of my blog to show lists of recently added and recently updated wiki entries - non-reliance on CamelCase wiki links. Many of my characters etc use joined CamelCase names (eg KillFork and DangerSpoon), and to avoid confusion I'd rather explicitly define links to wiki content - ability to categorize wiki entries - ability to compare history of wiki edits and easily reinstate older edits if wiki pages get 'graffiti'd' - ability to allow others to edit / create wiki entries, thru a user id / password system, so that regulars who would like to participate can do so - ability to customize presentation of wiki pages, presumably through CSS etc, so that I can maintain the 'look and feel' of my blog thru the wiki content - PHP based, though my host does run Perl, so if the killer wiki app is a Perl-based one, I'm sure I can muddle thru implementing it If anyone has any recommendations for other wiki applications I should look at before making a decision, I'd love to hear from you! Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Cleaning a resultset
Hi,
I have a resultset from a query and need to remove some rows after doing
some php processing then insert into another table i.e.
/** Get data**/
$qid = mysql_query('SELECT ...);
/** Clean data **/
while( $r = mysql_fetch_object( $qid ) ) {
}
How can i generate a new resultset / remove data from the existing
resultset
using this method?
Thanks for your help
Hi Shaun,
Basically while iterating thru the resultset in $qid, test / cleans the data
row by row, and perform an INSERT query for each row within your while loop
that you want to be inserted into your other table.
Hope this helps.
Much warmth,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] regular expression for integer range
Hi all,
I want to write regular expression for checking the string format entered
by user.
the allowed formats are
examples:
10
10,
10,12-10
12-10
that is the valid strings are:
1. only integer
2. an integer, range of integers example 3
and no other characters must be allowed.
Hi babu,
As you've pointed out, you have 4 distinct scenarios to deal with, and it
may be very difficult, without a great deal of tuning and tweaking, to
define a regular expression that can effectively match all 4 scenarios
without including false matches as well.
One way of dealing with this is to build more specialized and exact regular
expressions for each possible scenario and group them together in an if
statement.
Eg.
if (preg_match('/^\d+$/',$subject) || preg_match('/^\d+,$/',$subject) ||
preg_match('/^\d+,\d+-\d+$/', $subject) || etc etc){
// code for successful match of valid data in $subject
} else {
// code for invalid data in $subject
}
Basically, the if/else statement is testing each distinct possible pattern
and executing code if any of those distinct possible patterns match.
It may not ultimately be the most graceful way of dealing with the
situation, but having spent many hours attempting to tweak complex regular
expressions looking for the magic combination, I've learned that breaking
scenarios down this way can save a lot of development time and frustration.
This doesn't mean there isn't a benefit to finding the perfect regular
expression for your needs, just that it can often be difficult to guarantee
your code won't be plagued by false matches or false exclusions as your
expression becomes more and more complex.
Hope this helps a little.
Much warmth,
Murray
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Re: [PHP] php/mysql web question
hi... if an app has a webpage that has to interface/display data from a mysql db, does the app have to essentially do a new db_connection for each time that a user accesses the page during the session. as far as i can tell, it does. in other words, the page would need to look something like: ? start the page do the db_connect do the db_query process the information from the db/tbl close the db_connection ? the only reason i ask is that it would be nice/good if there was some way of opening a connetion once for a given session (save bandwidth) as well as somehow saving data from the db/tbl (short of using session vars) Hi Bruce, Basically what you're asking about is persistent connections from PHP to MySQL, which are performed using mysql_pconnect(). In the pseudo-code outline you have above, you don't need to perform the 'close the db_connection' step. Each time a page loads that has a mysql_pconnect statement, it will check to see if an existing (or persisted) connection is available, and will use it instead of creating a new connection, if one does. If no persisted connection is found to be available, mysql_pconnect goes ahead and creates the connection, and persists it for future connection attempts. Each page should still probably perform the mysql_pconnect function, since unless you have a very statically defined interaction of pages, you may not be able to guarantee that a connection already exists when a particular page is loaded. Don't forget that while closing the db connection isn't necessary on a page-by-page basis when using persistent connections, you should still habitually free recordsets either at the bottom of the page, or at a point in your code where you know they are no longer needed. Hope this helps a little. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Saturdays and Sundays
Hi, Is it possible to get the number of saturdays and sundays for a given month / year? Thanks for your help. Hi Shaun, Not sure if there's a graceful PHP solution (there probably is, but can't think of one, myself, right at this moment) but it sounds like what you might need is a calendar table in your database. This is a common approach to solving a number of date-related issues, of the type you're asking about. A typical structure might be Recid (int autoincrement) Date (datetime) Year (int) Month (int) Day (int) Day_name (varchar) Month_name (varchar) Etc.. A record for today's date would then look like: 1, '2005-09-01', 2005, 9, 1, 'Thursday', 'September' There are a number of other fields you could add, depending on your needs (financial_quarter, for example, if your site is a business application, week_num and so on) You would then write a routine that would populate the table with appropriate values for any given time period (10 years into the future, for example) and thus would be able to very simply perform operations like: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM date_info WHERE year=2005 and month=9 and (day_name='Saturday' or day_name='Sunday') Again, there may be a better solution in PHP, but any date-intensive application would probably benefit from the above approach. In particular, it becomes very useful when you use the recid value for the date from your calendar table in application data tables instead of the actual date, allowing you to perform very flexible queries where you might be interested in sales results for all the Thursdays in every September for the last 5 years, etc. Regards, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] conditional statement inside while loop?
Hello everyone,
I'm using a while loop to display a list of people contained in my
database.
I'd like to assign different font colors to each depending on which city
they're from, but I can't seem to get an if/elseif/else statement to work
inside the while loop. Is there another way to do this?
Hi Zach,
There should be no reason why you can't use if/elseif/else within your while
loop. The fact that you're experiencing problems strongly suggests that you
have a combination of conditionals in your if/elseif/else that is
effectively ignoring the data being returned from your recordset.
It may be something as simple as using = in your if statement instead of
== (ie, so the conditional is always true, because you're using the
assignment = operator instead of the evaluative == operator), or a
combination of conditions, each of which are accurate but which when placed
together cause problems.
To get an idea where your problem is occurring, try going from simple to
complex. Start with something like the following pseudo-code:
while ($row = get_data_from_your_recordset){
if (strlen($row['a_recordset_field']) 0){
echo Data found: . $row['a_recordset_field'] . br /;
} else {
echo Data not foundbr /;
}
}
The assumption being made above is that you will be using a field from your
recordset that contains data that is ordinarily longer than 0 bytes.
Doing the above will demonstrate that at the very least you are returning a
valid recordset and that conditional statements work within while loops. If
even this fails, then check the SQL that is being used to populate the
recordset, and make sure that you are using the same field names in your PHP
code as is being returned from the table by the recordset.
Once the above is working, add back in your actual conditional(s), one by
one. You're looking for the point where 'working' code becomes 'broken'
code. Most of the time when you debug in this way it becomes obvious why the
code isn't behaving the way you expect it to. If there's still any confusion
at that point, at least you will be in a better position to supply actual
code to the list, so we can work out the real problem.
Much warmth,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] (Yet another) I'm blind ... post
In this code, I'm not getting the value of $list passed to the Mailman page. I've checked this umpteen times by now, but fail to see the error. I've beaten myself suitably with a steel ruler -- but it didn't help. Nor does the cold I'm coming down with I suppose. Anyone see the error, and feel like pointing it out to me? Martin S Hi Martin, Try checking for the value in $_POST['lista'] on your subscribe page. Failing that, try the following: print_r($_POST); This should give you all the variables and values being sent by the form to the page being used to process that form. Hope this helps. Much warmth, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Problem With Inner Loop
Hi,
The following code is attempting to display a list of work types for all
the
users in my database. However it only loops through the inner loop once
and
I can't work out why, can anyone help here please?
Thanks for your help
table
?php
include('application.php');
$staff_qid = mysql_query('SELECT
U.User_ID,
CONCAT_WS( , U.user_Firstname, U.User_Lastname) AS User_Name
FROM Users U, Allocations A, Projects P
WHERE U.User_ID = A.User_ID
AND A.Project_ID = P.Project_ID
AND P.Project_ID = 38
AND (U.User_Type = Staff
OR U.User_Type = Manager
OR U.User_Type = Administrator)
ORDER By User_Name');
$work_type_qid = mysql_query('SELECT
Work_Type_ID,
Work_Type
FROM Work_Types
WHERE Project_ID = 38
ORDER BY Day_Type');
?
table
?php while( $staff_r = mysql_fetch_object( $staff_qid ) ) { ?
tr
?php while( $work_type_r = mysql_fetch_object( $work_type_qid ) ) { ?
td?php echo $work_type_r-Work_Type; ?/td
?php } ?
/tr
?php } ?
/table
Hi Shaun,
Looking at your code, it doesn't appear that there's an actual relationship
between your two queries? Ie the select statement for the 'inner' query
doesn't reference any value returned by the select statement from the
'outer' query.
This means that for every record returned by the outer query, the same
record or records will be returned by the inner query, which doesn't seem to
match the intention of the summary you gave at the top of your email. This
could be an error of interpretation on my part. It may well be that every
record returned by the inner query is relevant to each and every record
returned by the outer query. It's hard to tell from the details you've
included.
Having said which, I'm personally more used to situations where the
following occurs (warning, pseudo-code alert!):
$outerrs = select_query;
while ($outerdata = get_result_from_outerrs){
$innerrs = select_query_using_value_in_where_clause_from_$outerdata;
while ($innerdata = get_result_from_innerrs){
display_information_from_outerdata_and_or_innerdata;
}
}
In the above situation, the inner query is called for each record in the
outer query, indicating a relationship between the two resultsets.
As another thought, have you run the inner select statement against your db
(ie using PHPMyAdmin / MySQL Query Browser / etc) to confirm that under
normal circumstances that query actually returns more than one record?
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] How can I format text in textarea?
Hi When I enter text as more than on paragrahs in a textarea field,The text is displayed in one solid block of text even though I have entered it in paragraphs. How I can to insert line breaks in the text. (The values of textarea is stored in database and then displayed.) Bushra Hi Bushra, When displaying the data stored in your db from a textarea field, use the nl2br() function. This converts newlines in the data into br / html tags. You're currently not seeing the paragraph breaks because the HTML specification doesn't display newline / carriage returns when a page is rendered in a browser -- you have to specifically indicate where paragraph breaks should take place using HTML tags. Eg: echo nl2br($data_from_db_entered_via_textarea); See: http://au2.php.net/nl2br Regards, Murray --- http://www.planetthoughtful.org Building a thoughtful planet... -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] divide-column?
Hi there! How do I do a sort in PHP where a column in a db must be two other columns divided...`? snip Hi Gustav, You should be able to use the divide operation in your query's ORDER BY clause. Eg SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY (field1 / field2) Regards, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] divide-column?
Murray @ PlanetThoughtful wrote: Hi there! How do I do a sort in PHP where a column in a db must be two other columns divided...`? snip Hi Gustav, You should be able to use the divide operation in your query's ORDER BY clause. Eg SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY (field1 / field2) You might need to do: SELECT *, (field1 / field2) AS divField FROM mytable ORDER BY divField as I'm not sure if you can use expressions like that in the ORDER BY clause. Maybe... Hi Jasper, The statement I included worked in testing when run against my local installation of MySQL. Still, good to point out different options, in the event that something goes awry. Regards, Murray --- Lost in thought... http://www.planetthoughtful.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Resizing thumbnails to the browser
Hello All, I have a series of thumbnails on my site of photos I've taken that are all 150px in width, but of variable height. I want to randomly display one of the thumbnails each time the home page of my site is loaded in a column that is 140px wide. I'm wondering if anyone can point me at some code that would achieve this? All of the thumbnails are in jpg format. So, essentially, I'm trying to resize the thumbnails down to 140px wide while maintaining the aspect ratio of the image's height. I have GD enabled. Any help appreciated! Much warmth, Murray --- http://www.planetthoughtful.org Building a thoughtful planet, one quirky comment at a time.
[PHP] Class for creating RSS 2 feed?
Hi All, Just curious if anyone knows of an existing class that will take MySQL records containing HTML and create a valid RSS 2.0 newsfeed from them? Much warmth, Murray --- http://www.planetthoughtful.org Building a thoughtful planet, one quirky comment at a time. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Translating english into amglish
Hi All, I'm based in Australia but my blog is predominantly read by Americans. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a class that will translate Australian / UK / Canadian / Whathaveyou English spellings into their American English equivalents? In other words, a class that will take a string with spellings such as The colour of my neighbour's car, I recently realised, isn't grey after all and will return The color of my neighbor's car, I recently realized, isn't gray after all, and so on. Given time I'm sure I could work out many of the transformation rules myself, and implement them via regular expressions, but why reinvent the wheel if someone has already done so? Much warmth, Murray --- http://www.planetthoughtful.org Building a thoughtful planet, one quirky comment at a time.
[PHP] Re: Ouput HTML w/PHP
Rick Emery wrote: This leads (sort of) to a second question: how can I validate my HTML? My applications run on an intranet (with database access), so I can't use the W3C Validator to point to the URL. If I try to upload the file, the validator doesn't parse the PHP to get the HTML output (which is why I wonder if I'm not better writing the HTML and sticking PHP where it's needed). Is there a way for me to maybe use the PHP tidy functions on the string containing the HTML ouput to validate it? If you run FireFox you can download the entirely invaluable Web Developer plugin, one feature of which (under the Tools button) is Validate Local HTML. This automates a post of your page to the W3C Validator, thus not requiring a URL visible to the ineternet. The only caveat being, you do still need internet access from your development machine for the post to be possible. This is a great way for developers to validate the output of their code while it still resides on their local machines, prior to actually uploading the code to a public (and therefore visible) site. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: security question...??
if i as a bank, refuse to allow you to signin to my server, because i detect that your client is not valid/legitimate, meaning i think it's been hacked, how have i trampled the rights of anyone. i haven't. will some customers run, sure.. perhaps.. will i potentially feel better. yeah. will i potentially have something that i can promote as an extra level of security that others don't have, maybe.. The banking industry is generally not slow in exploring security issues. In point of fact, I know a guy here in Australia who works as a consultant for the major banks on encryption protocols and strategies (and his encryption-related background before working privately for the banking industry is *scary*), so it should be a given that banks do care about security both generally and specifically. That having been said, you're waving the stick around by the wrong end. It is fundamentally more important to a bank that general access to customer records be protected, not to specific records relating to any one customer because of that customer's negligence. By this I mean, most of their money is invested in attempting to stop hostile attempts to gain access to customer databases at their end, not at stopping hostile attempts to gain access to customer data at the client's end. Why? Because that's where the liability lies. Follow the money. If you expose your own records by being foolish enough to run spyware-ridden browser software, this is your own issue. Again, as I mentioned before, once the data is in your hands, it's your responsibility. Behave responsibly or stupidly / ignorantly, the choice is ultimately yours. let people continue to read/hear about massive losses of data and see what happens... Again, the massive losses of data we generally hear about are not as a result of sniffer programs sitting at the client end. They're ordinarily about hackers gaining access to the data at the source, where thousands or millions of customer records can be compromised, not at the client. This doesn't mean it's not an issue, but that it's an issue that can't and won't be addressed by anything more than public awareness campaigns. Which is why I think you're wasting energy on this topic. I'd much rather see you or anyone else, for that matter, putting this care and attention into reviewing how secure your app is, even if it's for the 20th time, than wondering how you go about hypothetically doing something that can't be done, and which, to the best of anyone's knowledge, isn't going to be practically implemented by anyone any time soon. Obligatory, Oh my god, can you really believe they did that? story: From a consultancy project I was hired on to extend a retail web site. SSL encryption where customer data was being entered or viewed? Check. Efforts to negate the potential of SQL / code injection? Check. Backup strategy? Daily dump of all records using PHPMyAdmin. From a directory where SSL was not being enforced. All that customer data. All that effort to protect it from being exposed to hostile eyes. From a directory where SSL was not being enforced. Makes you want to weep. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: security question...??
from my perspective, i strongly disagree... if you're going to be writing apps that deal with sensitive information, you better damm well give some thought as to how secure the client is, or even if the client is actually valid! To the best of my knowledge, if you're developing an app that uses a web browser as the client, then you better damn well give up on lying awake at night worrying about this as an issue. IE, which still holds something like 80+% market share of the browser base, is full of many, many holes. I'm sure this isn't news to you. Unless you're talking about exposing this sensitive data only to a user base within a strictly maintained network environment, then you *must* assume that some of the data can and perhaps will be compromised at the client end some of the time. There are an amazing number of variables to take into account, all of which, under most circumstances, are entirely out of your control. Which version of which browser is being used? Which operating system? What service pack and security updates have been applied? Which firewall software or hardware is in use, if any? Which antiviral software is being used, and how often is it being updated? Another way of looking at this is, where does your responsibility as a web developer end? Is it up to you to be concerned what happens to the data once it has been requested by the client, as opposed to it being the client's concern? What if a particular user is writing this data down in a notebook and loses it on the train on the way home from work? What if they're printing it out on a communal printer and other people are leafing through it while waiting for their own print jobs to finish? What if they're copying and pasting it into an email and blindly sending it to a huge distribution list? What if this data is stored in their browser cache and their laptop gets stolen? And on, and on, and on. Even given your suggestion re: browser vendors exposing some method of independently verifying 'unhacked' browsers, the implications would probably be many and varied. Do you suddenly stop communicating with every browser that has an unregistered 3rd-party add-on? What would be the effect on your business if customers objected to you telling them what browser add-ons they are allowed to use? How would that trickle over into open-source and smaller start-up initiatives that a company like Microsoft (infamously open-source opposed, according to the EFF) might not like to see thrive? Do you simply consolidate browser market dominance, and stifle innovation, by introducing a defacto licensing requirement? And on, and on, and on. If you're honestly concerned about the security of the data once it has been requested, then all I can suggest is, don't use a browser as the client. Develop a purpose-built client that enforces more security than you can hope for out of a browser. Even then, accept that the people who request the data may not have even the slightest respect for your security concerns once it's in their possession. As a last resort, and purely as a public awareness initiative, you might want to invite your users to check their browser for known spyware, etc, using a service such as DoxDesk (http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/). I believe this site uses an activex control to specifically check details in IE. I have no idea how accurate it is. Alternatively, you could encourage them to use an application such as Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/) etc to perform routine security checks. Beyond that, like I said, get some sleep. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Retrievable weather service info?
Hi All, Just wondering if anyone knows of a free weather service that can be interrogated by PHP for information such as current temperature for a range of cities around the world? Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Retrievable weather service info?
http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html Weather XML Data Feed Now you can include weather from The Weather Channel in your own application by signing up for access to our XML data feed. We'll enable you to search for a location and to integrate current conditions and the forecast for today and tomorrow in your application - for FREE! Hope that helps Zac Hi Zac, Thanks for the suggestion! Having downloaded weather.com's xml sdk I'm a little bemused to see that you are required to display referral links provided by weather.com to make use of the service. I'd be very happy to include a weather details provided by... link on the page in question, but carrying unspecified referral links, particularly when the application is simply my personal blog, is a little more of a constraint that I'm comfortable with. However and again, thank you for the suggestion! Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Retrievable weather service info?
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/zone/ Hi Philip, This would probably have been ideal for what I have in mind (don't mind going to a little effort to parse the text files) but appears to be limited to US information only, whereas I'm hoping to be able to randomly select a city from around the world and present it's current time and weather information. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: reverse MD5 ???
In that framework there is no such thing as decrypting an MD5 digest, because an MD5 digest is not an encrypted version of the message to start with. No amount of CPU power will change this basic fact -- though CPU power can be used to do a brute force search for strings which will generate a given MD5 value. However, as stated before, at current levels of computing power this is not feasible for messages beyond I think 7 or 8 characters long (don't quote me on that). One real-world example of the potential weakness of 'md5 out of the box' comes from a consultancy project I was involved in not so long back. The app in question was storing the md5 value of 4-digit PINs in the background database, and the owners of the app were quietly confident that this meant the PINs were 'encrypted' and 'secure'. Of course, there are only 10,000 possible PIN values between and , regardless of whether or not they're stored in plaintext or md5 hashed form, and I guess it took me less than 15 minutes to build a reference table of all md5 hash values for the possible plaintext PINs and therefore effortlessly retrieve the plaintext PIN values from their table. Imagine their surprise. And if *I* could do it... Md5 is a very handy way of 'securing' [1] password information, but only when the plaintext value offers enough possible variation in length and / or value to make building a 'possible variations' lookup table a difficult proposition. Regards, Murray Footnotes: [1] Without wanting to get into a technical debate of exactly what constitutes 'secure' when it comes to hashing / encrypting sensitive information -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: reverse MD5 ???
Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. It's a great example. :-) You're very welcome! If it helps just one other developer avoid the same pitfall, then today is a very good day. :-) Exactly, and this is why it's a good practice to use a seed when you generate MD5s for passwords. Which is exactly what I suggested, and what they ended up implementing, thanks to the fact that I could provide them with the original plaintext PIN values for the existing records. Still, once I'd had a chance to look at the plaintext PINs, it was depressing to notice the frequency of 'easy' PIN values, such as '', '1234', '' etc. Even with a seed, those values would have been relatively easy to guess at with frequency analysis, and it goes beyond my meager hostile decryption skills to guess at whether that made deriving the seed any easier or not. I suggested implementing a class that randomly selected from somewhere between 5 to 10 possible seed values when hashing the PIN for storage, which would have meant simply using all 5 or 10 seeds when comparing the PIN for subsequent validation, to reduce the frequency of hash-to-easy-PIN repetition, but it hadn't been implemented by the time my consultancy ended and I'd be willing to bet a year's pay it, or any other method of providing some sort of buffering against frequency analysis, hasn't been since. Of course, there's a whole conversation to be had regarding the fact that if your db server has been compromised to the point where the contents of tables are exposed, then it's reasonable to at least speculate (depending on your server setup and method by which it was accessed) that perhaps your entire app has been compromised, and your seed values may now be known to the hostile entity as well. Still and all, there's absolutely no reason to make the job of compromising your data any easier on a hypothetical hacker than is within your level of competency as a developer. Adding a seed value to md5 hashes is a simple and effective method under most circumstances that even beginner to intermediate developers can employ. In other words, It Is A Very Good Thing. ;-) Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] formatting paragraphs in to strings
Use the PHP str_replace function before writing it to the DB. Replace all \n characters with an empty string . http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php I think it might be better to replace all \n characters with spaces , otherwise you will end up with sentences that have no space break between them. Ie: original text This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. /original text ...would become: replaced text This is the first sentence.This is the second sentence. /replaced text Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] formatting paragraphs in to strings
Good point. Only problem is, if someone hit enter a-million times,
you would end up with a-million spaces where the \n characters were.
To take care of that repetition, maybe something like:
while (strpos($textarea_text, \n\n)) {
.
}
would be one way you could do it.
Ordinarily most browsers render multiple consecutive spaces as a single
space. This doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to remove them, just that
not doing so shouldn't effect the way the text is displayed in the div tag,
as the original poster mentioned was his intention.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] ampersands in href's
If I want to make a link to a URL which includes some GETs can I just do:
a href='{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}?p={$p}c={$s}' ... etc etc
or must I escape the ampersand somehow?
Depends very much on the document type of your page. Valid XHTML
(transitional, at least), for example, doesn't like single ampersands in a
href= links. For XHTML, you need to replace s with amp;s.
So the following link:
a href='http://www.somewhere.com/index.php?id1=1id2=2'Something/a
...should be changed to:
a href='http://www.somewhere.com/index.php?id=1amp;id=2'Something/a
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Frames or iframes? (Basically The devil or deap sea or A rock and a hard place etc) - - - - (0T)
Since its a forum and she is not doing any advertising its important the search engines index the site properly or shes going to have a big forum with no visitors. Then I read that the search engines dont like frames muchso I was thinking of using iframes and then I read about the evils of iframes...so I thought I'll ask you guys for your opinions/suggestions as I'm dead outa ideas and a bit confused...any alternate ideas too would be appreciated. As a compromise solution, you could greet visitors to the forum with a welcoming 'splash' page that displays your flash animation etc (please, please put a 'skip intro' link for the sake of repeat visitors) and then pass to your forum page(s). You could even put a static jpg at the top of the forum of the final image (ie once all that funky animation has played out) of your flash file, if you want to carry it over for a consistent look / feel. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Re: Best way to use other objects within classes?
If you're developing with PHP5, but the production environment is PHP4
then at the top of each script you probably want to add:
?php
ini_set('zend.ze1_compatibility_mode', 1);
?
This way you will have objects default to pass by value instead of by
reference and you don't end up deploying to production server with some
really hard-to-find dereferencing problems.
Hi Jason,
Not a bad tip, thank you! However, I've been, to the best of my knowledge,
explicit in passing by reference in my code wherever I've needed to access
objects within classes etc.
Many thanks,
Murray
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[PHP] Best way to use other objects within classes?
Hi All,
I'm using the MDB2 object to access my MySQL database. I have a number
of classes that perform page-building activities that need db access,
and I'm wondering what the best way to expose the MDB2 object to them is?
(Note: my development environment is PHP 5.0.3, but the production
environment is 4.3.10. This is my first project built with 5.x local and
4.1.x remote, so if anyone with more experience spots any fatal flaws
where I'm using 5.x specific methods etc, I'd appreciate knowing about them)
Currently, I'm instantiating the MDB2 class in my main page, then
passing it as an object reference to each of the other classes that
require it.
A simple representation of my main page and a class would be:
?
$db = connectMDB2(); // function that returns instantiated MDB2 object
$comments = new displayComments(); // class that performs displaying
of comments
$comments-set_db($db); // passing the MDB2 object to the class
$comments-doSomethingElse();
?
The displayComments() class might then look something like:
class displayComments{
private $db;
public function set_db($db){
$this-db = $db;
}
public function doSomethingElse(){
$sql = SELECT something FROM sometable;
$rs = $this-db-query($sql);
while ($row = $rs-fetchRow(MDB2_FETCHMODE_OBJECT)){
echo $row-something.br /;
}
$rs-free();
}
}
My main page calls on at least 8 or 9 such classes as it is being built,
and I'm concerned that I may not be handling the MDB2 object in respect
to them in the most efficient way possible. In a way, I guess this isn't
specifically about the MDB2 package, but more about how to handle
objects when they are required within classes.
I'd very much appreciate any comments or advice anyone might be able to
give.
Much warmth,
Murray
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Re: [PHP] Best way to use other objects within classes?
Greg Donald wrote: On 6/2/05, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: private $db; PHP4 doesn't have member visibility. Hi Greg, Thanks for this tip! Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Replacing 2 strings
?
function replace($string){
preg_match(/^\^([a-zA-Z]+?)_([a-zA-Z]+?)/, $string, $matcharr);
$string = str_replace($matcharr[0], $matcharr[1] . .$matcharr[2]
. :, $string);
return $string;
}
$string = ^JIM_JONES Leicester, 1720. Oxford, 1800 CONFIRMED: meeting
at
19.10;
echo replace($string);
?
One of the small benefits of this solution is that Will doesn't need to
know
what is contained in the target substring beforehand.
I should get into the habit of listing the assumptions my code makes.
In the above example, the following assumptions are present:
- The target substring (in this example, ^JIM_JONES) must *always*
appear at the beginning of the string for the function to perform its task
- The target substring will *always* begin with ^, will feature a _
between the two name elements, and will conclude with
- There will only be two name elements within the target substring (ie will
match ^JIM_JONES and ^MARY_BETH but will not match ^JIM or
^MARY_BETH_JONES)
- The function will only replace the first incidence of the target
substring. In the eventuality that the target substring value appears
multiple times in the string being processed, all other instances will be
left unchanged.
- All other contents of the string being processed can vary without impact
on the function.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Re: Free penetration test
For me, of course there is nothing wrong on the PHP Group help themselves making money with referrals. My point is that it is pretty common to not distract people with the details of who gets what with referrals because it does not change anything for who follows a link with our without the referral id. The price and the service is the same. What matters is who wants free help can get free help even if that help provides some benefit to the person that is providing it. If a person that gets free help does not like that whoever provides the help benefits from that too, that person is just being ungrateful and so does not deserve to be helped. Sweet Mamma, are we *still* arguing about this? Manuel (and whomever else): in general it is A Very Good Idea to declare whenever you have a commercial interest in a solution you provide in a forum such as this one. The problem, whether you agree or not, is that others will ask themselves, Did Manuel (or whomever) supply this link because it is the best solution he (or she) knows of to my problem, or because it is the only one from which he (or she) can earn money? It boils down to a question of motive: are you trying to help, or to use the forum as a method of earning extra income, or both? I tend to think the best of people -- I assume you offered the link in good faith, and you've said as much in posts since. That doesn't negate the fact that the appropriate place to explain your commercial affiliation is at the point where you originally supply such a link. It isn't hard. A simple paragraph similar to the following would be more than adequate: Please note: I have an affiliation relationship with this site. I picked it because it was the best I found when I was looking for solutions to the same problem you're asking about, and share it with you for the very same reason. See? Easy, and no-one questions your motives. To everyone else: many if not most of us take direct commercial benefit from being involved in this forum. I know I do. I ask questions about problems I can't solve on my own. I follow and keep track of solutions to other people's problems that seem innovative and better formulated than my own methods of dealing with those problems. I keep my general skills sharpened by helping people solve problems in areas where my skills are relatively strong. It would be naïve of me not to admit that this has a direct impact on my earning potential. As a group of professionals and semi-professionals (and even those amongst us who are simply learning or developing PHP skills out of general interest), it should be enough to say: Hey, that wasn't the best way to handle this. In future, you'd probably cause less aggravation by doing the following... And then move on. The person doesn't have to agree. You've done your part for peace-as-we-know-it in the PHP forum. If that simply isn't good enough for you in situations such as these, if you have to argue with Manuel (or whomever) until we've all but forgotten what the original freaking question was that began the holy war, then can I make a suggestion? If you happen to be a professional or semi-professional PHP programmer, you might want to think about tagging any and all posts you make to this forum about problems you're having with: I earn money from PHP programming. If you help me with this problem it will have a commercial benefit to me. And, really, wouldn't that be ridiculous? So, seriously, let's move on. At least until the next time someone posts an affiliation link without declaring their commercial interest, and then we can all look forward to having this argument again. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Replacing 2 strings
Someone much more clever that I can probably come up with something much
cleaner and efficient but This works...
Definitely not more clever and arguably not more efficient, but a different
way of handling this might be:
?
function replace($string){
$string = preg_replace(/(|\^|)/, ,$string);
$string = str_replace(_, , $string);
$string = ucwords(strtolower($string));
$string = str_replace( , -, $string);
return $string;
}
echo replace(^JIM_JONES);
?
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Replacing 2 strings
AHHH! ucwords(); I probably looked right at it a million times.. I knew
there had to be something to do that
Lol, I know that feeling well!
One thing, btw, looking at the solution you provided. Once you'd
preg_split()ed the string into component words, you could have simply
applied strtoupper() directly to the first character of each word in your
foreach loop.
As an example:
?
$string = this;
$string{0} = strtoupper($string{0});
echo $string; // should return value of This
?
Just thought it was worth mentioning.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Replacing 2 strings
This is a great help, thanks to both. One question I have though. How do I just leave the formatting as is? In the loop you gave me, Brian...: [snippage] I can't see how I can disregard strtolower without disrupting the rest of the function! My problem is $string contains a whole load of text, the formatting of which needs to be retained... Hmmm. Methinks your problem is a little more complex than originally presented. Can you give us a pseudo-example of what the string might actually contain? I think both Brian and I took your original message to mean that your string would ONLY contain a value like ^JIM_JONES, but from this message I get the sense that the value you're trying to target may be buried in a string with other text on either side? Again, an example that is as close to your real-world needs as possible would be very helpful. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Replacing 2 strings
?php // this will produce JIM JONES
function replace($string, $search)
{
$string = strstr($string, $search)
$string = preg_replace(/(|\^|)/, ,$string);
$string = str_replace(_, , $string);
return $string;
}
$text = 'My name is ^JIM_JONES and I like ice cream';
$search_string = '^JIM_JONES';
echo replace($text, $search_string);
?
This is a pretty good solution, however for the sake of paranoia about
potentially removing characters that Will may not want targeted by the
function (i.e., what if , , ^ or _ legitimately appear later in
the string and are accidentally removed?), I'd do something like the
following:
?
function replace($string){
preg_match(/^\^([a-zA-Z]+?)_([a-zA-Z]+?)/, $string, $matcharr);
$string = str_replace($matcharr[0], $matcharr[1] . .$matcharr[2]
. :, $string);
return $string;
}
$string = ^JIM_JONES Leicester, 1720. Oxford, 1800 CONFIRMED: meeting at
19.10;
echo replace($string);
?
One of the small benefits of this solution is that Will doesn't need to know
what is contained in the target substring beforehand.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Regex question: replacing incidences of character when not enclosed within HTML tags? (somewhat solved)
So, thinking about it a little more, I decided what I was looking for was
a
regular expression that would allow me to replace any incidences of
hyphens
when not contained within tags (i.e., when not contained between and
).
And this is where things have ground to a halt.
Hi All,
After toying with this for several hours I decided to give up on trying to
work out a way to achieve this via a single regular expression replacement.
My simpler 'solution' now is to pull out all text not contained within tags
using preg_match_all(), and run a str_replace() across these values to
replace any incidences of hyphens, and then another str_replace() to replace
the content with the substring where hyphens were found.
So, something like:
?
preg_match_all(/(^|)(.+?)(|$)/m, $text,$hypharr);
for ($i=0; $i count($hypharr[0]); $i++){
$rephyph = str_replace(-,-span style='font-size: 0px;'
/span, $hypharr[0][$i]);
if ($rephyph $hypharr[0][$i]){
$text= str_replace($hypharr[0][$i],$rephyph,$text);
}
}
?
This seems to achieve what I'm looking for, ie replacing hyphens when not
contained in HTML tags.
Regards,
Murray
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[PHP] Regex question: replacing incidences of character when not enclosed within HTML tags?
Hi All, I have content that contains several lengthy hyphenated sentences, such as: This-is-a-sentence-in-which-all-the-words-are-hyphenated. I've noticed that some (maybe all?) browsers, particularly Firefox, will not wrap long strings of hyphenated words when they are contained in a DIV tag -- instead, the sentence simply runs out across the right border of the DIV and overlaps any content to the right. After some experimentation, I discovered that a hack that seems to behave well in Firefox, Opera, and IE6 is to replace all incidences of the hyphen (-) character with -span style='font-size:0px;' /span. This effectively creates a zero-width space character after each hyphen and allows the sentence to wrap as desired. My dilemma is that while I want to replace any hyphens with the above hack when and where they appear within normal sentences, I don't want to replace them when and where they appear within HTML tags. So, imagine I have a string that contains: div style='text-decoration: none; font-size:11px;'This-is-a-sentence-that-contains-hyphenation. This is a sentence that doesn't contain hyphenation. This is a a href='http://www.nowhere.com/-4484784/index.html'link/a that will take you span style='font-weight: bold;'nowhere/span./div I managed to build a replacement regular expression that would ignore any hyphenated strings that were terminated by a colon (:) character (which effectively leaves inline style attributes in DIV and SPAN blocks untouched). ? $thingy = preg_replace(/(-)(?![\w-]+?:)/i, \$1span style='font-size:0px;' /span, $whatever); ? This seemed to work well in most circumstances, however, in testing I discovered several incidences of a href= urls that also contain hyphens (in particular, some that lead to Amazon.com). So, thinking about it a little more, I decided what I was looking for was a regular expression that would allow me to replace any incidences of hyphens when not contained within tags (i.e., when not contained between and ). And this is where things have ground to a halt. I'm wondering if anyone can give me some help with this? I've tried to find a solution via google, but most regex examples dealing with HTML tags are concerned with finding tags and their contents, not with finding specific instances of characters not contained within tags. Any help appreciated! Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Very long delay posting to php-general (might be OT)
I don't know WHY posts take hours to get through, but I'm not honestly seeing it as a problem personally. I see one problem, some questions get the same answer from several people. This increases the list traffic without any benefit. That, of course, is exacerbated by the delay. If it takes 4 hours for responses to appear, it will seem to others on the list in that time that no-one else has responded. And I'd personally rather 'too many' people replied, than too few or none at all. Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Regex nightmares
[Course, when you *DO* need RegEx it's *more* than a bit of a headache. More like a migraine :-)] One of these days I will truly master regular expressions. After that, enlightenment should be easy. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] db aware text editor? (slightly OT?)
Hi All, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a 'db aware' text editor? By 'db aware', I mean one that can pull a recordset back from a local MySQL server and edit the content of fields much like a standard text editor does with files. I could probably build myself a simple one in Java, but before I undertake that task I thought I'd ask if any of the better known editors are capable of doing this, as I'd rather be able to use a feature-rich editor (ie one that has features such as regex search and replace, macro recording etc) than a hand-built alternative. Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] html editor written in PHP
Has anyone seen an example of a HTML editor written in PHP (no JS)? You know the ones - for adding HTML tags to a text field, etc. Thanks! You've already received a number of responses indicating that it's not possible to have a pure PHP browser enabled HTML editor, mainly due to the fact that the editing itself takes place on the client (which requires a client-side language, such as JavaScript), while PHP is only run at the server. One lateral solution, however, would be using something like the PHP ports of either the Markdown or Textile classes to provide HTML markup using a simpler syntax. Using Markdown as an example, you would type: _This sentence will be displayed with emphasis_ When you next retrieve this content and pass it through the Markdown class, it automatically becomes: emThis sentence will be displayed with emphasis/em The differences between the two classes is that Textile is more featured, but in my personal opinion less intuitive, while Markdown is obviously less featured, but easier to use 'without thinking about it' as you go about generating content. [1] Both of these classes are used extensively to provide content markup in blogging systems such as MovableType and WordPress, etc. There may be similar classes out there (another one is BBCode, which is popular on forum applications such as Invision PowerBoard). PHP Markdown: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/ PHP Textile: http://jimandlissa.com/project/textilephp Hope this helps, Murray [1] Note: which one you might use would depend on how comfortable you are with their applicable syntaxes and how varied your markup needs are. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Image Verification - Problems in Safari, Mac OS X
But here's the problem that came afterwards in IE ! IE is storing the image in it's cache.. And it's displaying the same image on the verification page whether you use the BACK button, FORWARD button, or actually go through the website and land back on the verification page. So in IE, right now, unless you actually HIT the REFRESH button, it's not changing the image as it's picking up the image from the Cache. Now I'm not sure what exactly I should do to fix this whole situation. Try forcing the browser to bypass the cache by adding the lines at the following link to your page: http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/21068/fid/51 Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] PHP-GTK, or something else, for desktop app development?
Hi All, I'd like to do some desktop app development and I'm looking for others' thoughts on whether PHP-GTK is a suitable environment in which to work? Years ago I developed desktop apps in Access / VB6, but it's been long enough now, and VB in particular has changed so much in the intervening time, that I'd have to relearn these anyway, so it seems like a good time to either consolidate my PHP coding or to pick up some other language. Not to mention that Access is entirely despicable for any purpose, desktop app development included [1]. I'm wondering if PHP-GTK is mature / featured enough to handle a relatively complex desktop app project, using features like table grids for displaying / editing data stored in a MySQL backend and so on. My other alternative is to bite the bullet and learn something like Java, though I assume my learning curve would be steeper and more time-consuming. I pick Java because a) Everyone Seems To Love Javatm, and b) there appear to be at least a couple of decent free Java IDEs available in NetBeans and Eclipse (and maybe others that I don't know about). In essence, I'm looking for a desktop app development environment that is featured, connects well to MySQL, and is relatively painless to learn. Java may not suit the last of those criteria, but I don't know enough about it at this point to be scared of it if it is painful to learn. Anyone have any thoughts to share about PHP-GTK and / or other desktop app development environments that might be more suitable? Freeness of development tools is a big plus to me in this, if that needs to be explicitly said. Much warmth, Murray [1] Just my opinion. I know I'd get a healthy argument from several developers that I know. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] dynamically updating site
I looking for a way to update certain parts of a site that is highly dynamic. I've tried creating static files via cronjobs then including them, but it is a pain to do. for instance, i have a news page that utilizes mysql, rather than query the DB on each page load i would like to have it update at say 5 minute intervals.. not sure if this is possible to do without generating static files.. any suggestions? I can't see why you couldn't have a class that you call at the top of the page that checks the date/time of the 'static' page, generates the content into the static page from the DB if older than 5 minutes and then passes to displaying the content of that static page. In pseudo-logic, this would be something like: If datetime_of_static_news_page 5 minutes ago: Replace content of static news page with data from db End if Display content of static news page I doubt there'd be significant overhead in the static page generation, since it would only be called once per 5 mins. Though, I guess it depends on exactly how much data / markup / etc is going into that page, and the tradeoff between writing the file and then displaying it versus whatever performance concern you're attempting to address in hitting the db each time the page is viewed. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] Add to array problem
I'm having a little problem adding to an array. Each time I add to an array it wipes what was previously added. I'm using array_push(). $items=array(); $items=array_push($items, $_POST[whatever]); I'm missing something easy. Try: $items=array(); array_push($items, $_POST[whatever]); In other words, remove the $items= in front of array_push( Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] regex question
What pattern can I use to match ONLY single occurrences of a character in
a string.
e.g., Some text @ and some mo@@re and [EMAIL PROTECTED], etc @@@.
I only want the two occurrences with a single occurrence of @.
@{1} doesn't work; there are 4 matches.
/[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ seems to do what you're looking for. In
other words, match the
@ symbol where it is not preceded or followed by another @ symbol.
To test, try:
preg_match_all('/[EMAIL PROTECTED]@[EMAIL PROTECTED]/','Some @ text with the @t
sym@@bol @@@',
$thing, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($thing);
There may be a more intuitive way to do this, but at least it seems to work.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] regex question
What pattern can I use to match ONLY single occurrences of a character in
a string.
e.g., Some text @ and some mo@@re and [EMAIL PROTECTED], etc @@@.
I only want the two occurrences with a single occurrence of @.
@{1} doesn't work; there are 4 matches.
Thanks
Please ignore my last email re: your question. I realized that the negation
of the range containing the @ would end up capturing unwanted characters.
As an alternative, try the following:
preg_match_all('/(?!@)@(?!@)/','Some @ text with the @t sym@@bol ',
$thing, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($thing);
Hope that's a little more relevant to your question.
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] regex question
Try (for example if character was A) ...
([^A]|^)A([^A]|$)
This matches four cases:
A is at beginning of string and there is another letter after it,
A has a letter before it and a letter after it,
A is at end of string and there is a letter before it,
or A is the only character in the string.
I think this has the same problem that my first attempt at this regex
experienced.
I.e., it will correctly 'find' single instances of 'A', but it will 'match'
against unwanted characters on either side of each 'found' 'A' because they
are not-A.
For example, the following:
preg_match_all('/([^A]|^)A([^A]|$)/','A sentence with instAnces of AAA
chArActers', $thing, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($thing);
produces:
Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] = A
[1] = 0
)
[1] = Array
(
[0] = tAn
[1] = 19
)
[2] = Array
(
[0] = hAr
[1] = 34
)
)
[1] = Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] =
[1] = 0
)
[1] = Array
(
[0] = t
[1] = 19
)
[2] = Array
(
[0] = h
[1] = 34
)
)
[2] = Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] =
[1] = 1
)
[1] = Array
(
[0] = n
[1] = 21
)
[2] = Array
(
[0] = r
[1] = 36
)
)
)
Note the multiple instances of characters other than 'A' in the array. Also
note that the 4th qualifying 'A' (the second 'A' in 'chArActers') is missed,
because the 'r' is already part of the capture of the preceding 'A').
On the other hand, the following:
preg_match_all(' /(?!A)A(?!A)/','A sentence with instAnces of AAA
chArActers', $thing, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($thing);
produces:
Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] = A
[1] = 0
)
[1] = Array
(
[0] = A
[1] = 20
)
[2] = Array
(
[0] = A
[1] = 35
)
[3] = Array
(
[0] = A
[1] = 37
)
)
)
Here, only the target characters are matched, without the confusion of extra
unwanted characters. All 4 target 'A's are caught, because the patterns on
either side of the 'A' in the regex pattern are non-capturing. So, basically
this is employing a non-capturing negative look-behind and a non-capturing
negative look-ahead, rather than capturing negated character classes.
I've probably only managed to confuse things more than they were, but I'm
hoping some of what I've said above makes sense (to me, if no-one else).
Regards,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] marking words bold
I am trying to mark words inside a sentence bold. Problem is, if there is
an
overlap it does not work anymore.
I am using this code: $t = str_replace($word, b$word/b, $text);
For eample:
Mark those words bold: adventure in singapore
Text: My adventure flying to singapore
The problem lays in the word in. The code I use does produce following:
bsbin/bgapore/b
which of course does not work properly.
Does anybody have a good sugestion on how to improve this?`
Hi Merlin,
Sounds like you need to use preg_replace, specifically testing for word
boundaries. See http://au2.php.net/preg_replace and
http://php.mirrors.ilisys.com.au/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.syntax.php
for the \b word boundary syntax.
Not tested, but something like the following would probably be along the
right lines:
$thing = preg_replace('/\bin\b/i','bin/b','adventures in singapore');
echo $thing;
produces: adventures bin/b singapore, ignoring the 'in' characters
within 'singapore' because they don't form a word boundary
Hope this helps,
Much warmth,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] marking words bold
Include a space in your str_replace statement. For instance $t = str_replace( $word , B $word /B, $text); That should prevent the problem your having and ensure only individual words are bolded. Not the best solution if Merlin's code needs to account for the possibility of target words being preceded or followed by punctuation. Consider wanting to bold the word tour in the following sentence: $text = At this point we will commence our tour, guided by an operator recommended by the department of tourism.; $t = str_replace( tour , btour/b, $text); ... would fail, because the word tour in the sentence is immediately followed by a comma. $t = preg_replace(/\btour\b/, btour/b, $text); ... would work, because the comma forms a word boundary, with the added benefit that the tour in tourism would also remain untouched because there is word text directly after the r in tourism. Note: I realize your solution fits the example Merlin gave, but preg_replace offers a great deal more flexibility if you are not aware, ahead of time, exactly what the target string will contain. Just thought it was worth mentioning. Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
RE: [PHP] expand array into function arguments?
-Original Message-
From: Christopher J. Bottaro [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, 12 May 2005 5:13 AM
To: php-general@lists.php.net
Subject: [PHP] expand array into function arguments?
You can do this in Python:
code
def myFunc(arg1, arg2, arg):
#do something
myList = [1, arg, 5]
myFunc(*myList) # calls myFunc(1, arg, 2)
code
Can that be done in PHP, and if so, how?
Don't know if there's a better solution, but at the very least you could put
the values in an array, and pass the array to the function.
$arr = array();
$arr[] = First;
$arr[] = Second;
$arr[] = Third;
$val = my_function($arr);
function my_function($arr_in){
// do something with $arr_in[0];
// do something with $arr_in[1];
// do something with $arr_in[2];
}
Note: if you wanted the function to be able to change the actual values in
the array, you would need to pass it by reference rather than by value, eg:
Function my_function($arr_in){ etc...
The ampersand before the variable name in the function declaration indicates
the variable is being passed by reference.
Just a thought.
Much warmth,
Murray
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RE: [PHP] Strange characters
I dunno what the hell 0x96 is in MS Word, but if you want a dash, use an ASCII dash and be done with it. :-) Or, if you REALLY want that ASCII extended Linux dash (assuming it exists) I'm sure you can strtr(0x96, 0xYY, $string) and get it. Then it won't work on Windows, of course, but who cares about Windows? Cough. I care about windows. I hate windows, but I care about it. Unfortunately, I get paid a lot of money to care about it. Which I also hate. It would be nice to be poor and not have to care about windows. Hang on just a minute... Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Help with regex: breaking strings down to 'words' and 'phrases'
Hi All,
I'd very much appreciate some help building a regular expression for
preg_match_all that can differentiate between 'words' and 'phrases'.
For example, say I have a string that contains: 'this is an example of a
phrase'
I'd like to be able to break that down to:
this
is
an
example of a phrase
My current preg_match_all regex:
preg_match_all('([\w\-]+|[\(]|[\)])',this is an \example of a
phrase\',$arr);
returns the following:
Array
(
[0] = Array
(
[0] = this
[1] = is
[2] = an
[3] = example
[4] = of
[5] = a
[6] = phrase
)
)
Note: I'm using this to break elements of a string down to build an sql
string, which is why I'm looking for ( and ) characters (ie the
[\(]|[\)] part of the regex) and maintaining them in the array. A
real-world example of the the value being supplied to the regex might be
completed and January 2005 and not (store or online) etc. I already have
the logic to handle and, or, not and () but haven't been able to
figure out how to maintain substrings in quotes as a single value in the
array.
Any help appreciated!
Much warmth,
Murray
RE: [PHP] Help with regex: breaking strings down to 'words' and 'phrases'
On Wed, 11 May 2005, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful wrote:
Hi All,
I'd very much appreciate some help building a regular expression for
preg_match_all that can differentiate between 'words' and 'phrases'.
For example, say I have a string that contains: 'this is an example of
a
phrase'
I'd like to be able to break that down to:
this
is
an
example of a phrase
I haven't thought this through fully, but what if you exploded the string
on into an array. Then loop through the array and for every even
element, explode on a space, otherwise just store the whole string into
the new array.
I think I *may* have solved this at my end.
The following statement seems to work:
preg_match_all('/([\w\-]+?|[(]|[)]|\.+\)/U',strtoupper($prep_sql),$sqlarr)
;
I need to test it out with a whole series of different possible combinations
to see if it behaves the way I want it to, but so far the results are good.
If anyone can see any flaws, I'd love to know about them!
Many thanks,
Murray
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[PHP] Templating systems for single developers?
Hi All, Given that templating seems to be a hot topic at the moment, I'm wondering if anyone here uses templating in a single developer environment, and why if so? I've looked at various template systems from time-to-time but I've always come away thinking, 'yep, I can see the point in a team environment, particularly one that mixes designers and coders, but what would be the benefit to a lone developer like me?' So, if anyone out there uses a templating system (ie Smarty, PHPSavant etc) and they don't work in a team environment, I'd love to hear what benefits you derive from so doing. Much warmth, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Any alternative to POST method FTP uploads from client computer?
Hi All, I need to implement the ability to ftp upload files from client machines via a form in a web application I'm developing. From reading the PHP help, all I can find to perform this is the POST method for handling file uploads (http://au2.php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.php). From my perspective, while this seems to work, there are a couple of drawbacks, most important of which is that it seems you can only do comparisons of the uploaded file, against the potential that the file has already been uploaded, once the file has already been uploaded and is sitting in the server temp directory. This is a drawback to our application because the files can typically vary on a daily basis in size from 20mb thru to 400mb, and 400mb seems like a lot of bandwidth to consume to discover that the file already exists on our server. I had hoped there was a way in which I could retrieve stats of the file being uploaded prior to beginning the upload, to compare against files in the target directory, so that the application can advise the user that the file already exists and to give them the option to cancel the upload. Another minor drawback is that it seems the Post upload method changes the file datetime to the datetime of the upload. So, can anyone confirm that there is no other way to upload files from a client machine using a form? (and assuming they don't have an ftp server at their end). Much warmth, Murray
RE: [PHP] Any alternative to POST method FTP uploads from client computer?
Hi, On 5/9/05, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I need to implement the ability to ftp upload files from client machines via a form in a web application I'm developing. From reading the PHP help, all I can find to perform this is the POST method for handling file uploads (http://au2.php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.php). From my perspective, while this seems to work, there are a couple of drawbacks, most important of which is that it seems you can only do comparisons of the uploaded file, against the potential that the file has already been uploaded, once the file has already been uploaded and is sitting in the server temp directory. Instead use the dynamic file names say you upload a file filename.jpg when u upload it name it dynamiccaly by appending date and time before the file name like this 2005050501010-filename.jpg Hi, yes, I'm already doing this. Conflict of filename isn't my issue -- it's whether or not the file should be uploaded at all, in the first place. The difficulty being that you can't examine the file until *after* it has been uploaded. As others have suggested, using an ftp client application is one way to handle it, however, users being users, the feedback has been Why do we need to upload the files via an ftp client, *then* go to the web application and attach the filename to a job entry? Why can't we do it all at once? The answer being, Well, you can, but I bet you're going to be even more annoyed when you've uploaded a huge file via the web application using the POST upload method, only to find that the file is already there. Serves you right for having too many stakeholders in uploading the files, dunnit? Sometimes, you just can't win. Not that I don't understand the practicalities involved, but this one feature would have been nice. Regards, Murray -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
[PHP] Problem with array
Hi All,
I have 2 function, 1 which calls another, that I am attempting to use in a
page with, currently, some problems.
In essence, I have a hierarchical recordset table called tbl_content (contid
and parid, where parid contains the contid of the record to which the
current record belongs). A record without a parid value indicates that the
record is a project level record. I have another table with messages that
have been attached to records in tbl_content, called tbl_content_messages.
Tbl_content_messages contains a contid field indicating the record from
tbl_content to which each message has been attached.
I'm trying to create a summary page at the project level (ie all records in
tbl_content that do not have a parid value) displaying the number of
messages in each project (ie, attached to any record in tbl_content that is
part of the hierarchy chain underneath the relevant project record).
To do this, for each project I'm trying to determine the list of child
contid values so that I can do a count(*) in tbl_content_messages using the
IN operator, so that only messages attached to records in that project's
hierarchy chain are counted.
To generate that child list in the summary page, I'm using:
?
$leaflist = listProjectChildren($d-contid); // $d-contid
contains the contid of the project being summarised
?
The two functions I'm calling are:
?
function listProjectChildren($contid, $list=''){
if ($contid''){
$arrtree = array();
$arrtree = buildProjectTree($contid, $level=1);
for ($i=0;$i count($arrtree);$i++){
$list .= '{$arrtree[$i][2]}',;
}
}
$list = substr($list, 0,-1);
unset($arrtree);
return $list;
}
function buildProjectTree($contid, $level=1){
if ($contid''){
global $arrtree;
$sql = SELECT contid, parid, title FROM tbl_content
WHERE parid='$contid';
$rs = mysql_query($sql);
while ($d= mysql_fetch_object($rs)){
$ind = count($arrtree);
$arrtree[$ind][0] = $d-title;
$arrtree[$ind][1] = $level;
$arrtree[$ind][2] = $d-contid;
$arrtree[$ind][3] = $d-parid;
buildProjectTree($d-contid, $level+1);
}
mysql_free_result($rs);
}
return $arrtree;
}
?
My problem is that when I'm iterating through all of the project level
records, it appears that the content of $arrtree is never reset. New entries
are simply placed on the end, causing the for. loop that builds the
returned $list variable in listProjectChildren() to progressively return
larger and larger lists of contid values. As you can see, I try to UNSET()
the array prior to returning the $list variable, but this doesn't seem to
help.
Can anyone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?
Many thanks in advance!
Murray
RE: [PHP] Problem with array
Hi Richard, Color me confused. I removed global $arrtree; and added $arrtree = array(); to the function buildProjectTree() and now the parent function (listProjectChildren) returns no values at all. I've checked the page from which listProjectChildren() is being called, and $arrtree does not appear as a variable in it at all, so it seems global $arrtree; was doing SOMETHING, but at this point I have no idea what. Still trying to work this out, if anyone else has any suggestions? Much warmth, Murray -Original Message- From: Richard Lynch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 2 May 2005 5:04 AM To: Murray @ PlanetThoughtful Cc: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP] Problem with array On Sun, May 1, 2005 10:21 am, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful said: ? [Here there be snippage: please see original post for outline of problem] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
