WLScripting.com » Basics http://www.wlscripting.com PHP coding tutorials Wed, 19 May 2010 17:44:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9-beta-1 en hourly 1 Remove whitespace from string http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/67 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/67#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:15:47 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/?p=67 I have been doing a lot of coding using the framework CodeIgniter lately so I have been creating many simple helper functions to perform different tasks. My most recent project involves creating PDF files with text from a database. The problem is that the text from the database is dirty, meaning that in a person’s name there could be multiple spaces between the person’s first and last name or even spaces at the end of their name. In dealing with legacy data that you cannot change but needs to be output correctly without those spaces you get creative. The below function should help solve this issue.

<?php
function replace_whitespace($Value = '')
{
	// Replace any whitespace with only a single space
	return preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', trim($Value));
}
?>

Usage:

<?php
echo '<pre>';
$Text = 'White  Lake  Scripting';
echo $Text,' - ',strlen($Text),'<br />';
$Text = ReplaceWhitespace($Text);
echo $Text,' - ',strlen($Text);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Output:

White  Lake  Scripting - 22
White Lake Scripting - 20
]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/67/feed 1 Sanitize copy/paste text from word http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/58 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/58#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:54:28 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/58 In a recent project I have had to deal with text copied from a Microsoft Word document and pasted into a textarea. Word automatically changes a few certain characters to what it thinks it should be, such as the ellipsis and quotes. When dealing with inserting that text into a database I was getting errors. To solve my problems I created a sanitize function to replace these certain characters with acceptable characters.

<?php
// Used to sanitize Microsoft Word's Special Characters
// Good reference http://www.lookuptables.com

function SanitizeFromWord($Text = '') {

	$chars = array(
		130=>',',     // baseline single quote
		131=>'NLG',   // florin
		132=>'"', 	  // baseline double quote
		133=>'...',   // ellipsis
		134=>'**',	  // dagger (a second footnote)
		135=>'***',	  // double dagger (a third footnote)
		136=>'^', 	  // circumflex accent
		137=>'o/oo',  // permile
		138=>'Sh',	  // S Hacek
		139=>'<',	  // left single guillemet
		140=>'OE',	  // OE ligature
		145=>'\'',	  // left single quote
		146=>'\'',	  // right single quote
		147=>'"',	  // left double quote
		148=>'"',	  // right double quote
		149=>'-',	  // bullet
		150=>'-',	  // endash
		151=>'--',	  // emdash
		152=>'~',	  // tilde accent
		153=>'(TM)',  // trademark ligature
		154=>'sh',	  // s Hacek
		155=>'>',	  // right single guillemet
		156=>'oe',	  // oe ligature
		159=>'Y',	  // Y Dieresis
		169=>'(C)',	  // Copyright
		174=>'(R)'	  // Registered Trademark
	);
	
	foreach ($chars as $chr=>$replace) {
		$Text = str_replace(chr($chr), $replace, $Text);
	}
	return $Text;
}
?>

Enjoy!

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/58/feed 1 Random string generator http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/50 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/50#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:54:09 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/50 Have you ever needed a random string to be created for a certain task? The below code is great for using as a random password generator, security code generator and such.

<?php
function randomstring($length = 8) {
  // $salt contains the list of available characters to use in this random string
  $salt = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";
  // Start a random string
  srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
  $i = 0; // Set our length counter at 0
  while ($i < $length) { // Loop through creating our random string
    // Get the position of the random character we want
    $num = rand() % strlen($salt);
    // Use substr to extract this from our $salt above
    $tmp = substr($salt, $num, 1);
    // Add the character we got above and add to the rest of string
    $pass = $pass . $tmp;
    // Increment our length counter one
    $i++;
  }
  // We have finally reached our max length
  // Lets return the string for use in the rest of our script
  return $pass;
}
?>

To use this code you would run:

echo randomstring(8); // Produces a random 8 character long string
$rand = randomstring(8);
echo $rand;
]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/50/feed 1 Prevent direct file access http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/48 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/48#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:52:51 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/48 Do you have PHP files that you do not want visitors to directly run but would still like to use them in your code? Here is a little trick picked up from the code in the phpBB forum code.

Create a file named config.php or some other file that you are going to include before any other code. In this file put the following:

<?php
define('INMYSCRIPT', 1);
?>

This code creates a defined variable INMYSCRIPT which can be named as anything that you want. Then on every other page in your script that you do not want to be ran on their own put the following: (This filename is code.php)

<?php
if(!defined('INMYSCRIPT')){
echo 'You cannot access this file directly.';
die;
}

// Whatever other code you wish goes below here
echo 'This file is safe to be ran';
?>

Now, instead of the file outputting any data to the browser that could be harmful, the only content output is: “You cannot access this file directly”. You could very easily create a re-direct script to transfer them to a specific page or you could modify the text to any other HTML or other content you wanted.

Open up your web browser and try accessing code.php. You should get that error message that we created. Now if you create one last file that we will name as test.php, place the following:

<?php
require('config.php');
require('code.php');
?>

Now if you try accessing the test.php file from your web server you will be shown: “This file is safe to be ran”.

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/48/feed 0 Extract meta tags from a website http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/38 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/38#comments Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:33:22 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/38 Have you ever wanted to get the meta tags from any website in an easy to manage way? There is a built in PHP function called get_meta_tags. This extracts all meta tags from the website and places them in an array. This array contains the tag name as the key, then the value is the data for the meta tag. 

<?php
echo '<pre>'; // Make the tags easier to read with <pre>
// Get meta information of "http://www.wlscripting.com"
$metaTags = get_meta_tags('http://www.wlscripting.com');

// Print the array
print_r($metaTags);
echo '</pre>';
?>

This would produce an output of:

Array
(
    [keywords] => wlscripting, white lake scripting, whitelake, scripting, php, classes, code, counters, mysql, data validation, csv, free
    [description] => PHP Tutorials
    [author] => Daniel Kassner
    [robots] => ALL
)

You can then easily loop through the $metaTag variable to do anything you wished with the data.

**Note: You may also use the path to a file instead of a web address to achieve the same results.

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/38/feed 1 Advanced CSV Export http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/37 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/37#comments Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:15:20 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/37

An updated posting on this subject can be found at:
Creating a CSV file with PHP

In one of my last tutorials I explained how you can export data into a CSV. You can see that tutorial at: Export data to CSV (Comma Separated Value). In this tutorial you will learn more about getting items from a database instead of hand coding the CSV contents.

<?php
$db = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password'); // Connect to the database
$link = mysql_select_db('database name', $db); // Select the database name

function parseCSVComments($comments) {
  $comments = str_replace('"', '""', $comments); // First off escape all " and make them ""
  if(eregi(",", $comments) or eregi("\n", $comments)) { // Check if I have any commas or new lines
    return '"'.$comments.'"'; // If I have new lines or commas escape them
  } else {
    return $comments; // If no new lines or commas just return the value
  }
}

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tableName"); // Start our query of the database
$numberFields = mysql_num_fields($sql); // Find out how many fields we are fetching

if($numberFields) { // Check if we need to output anything
	for($i=0; $i<$numberFields; $i++) {
		$head[] = mysql_field_name($sql, $i); // Create the headers for each column, this is the field name in the database
	}
	$headers = join(',', $head)."\n"; // Make our first row in the CSV

	while($info = mysql_fetch_object($sql)) {
		foreach($head as $fieldName) { // Loop through the array of headers as we fetch the data
			$row[] = parseCSVComments($info->$fieldName);
		} // End loop
		$data .= join(',', $row)."\n"; // Create a new row of data and append it to the last row
		$row = ''; // Clear the contents of the $row variable to start a new row
	}
	// Start our output of the CSV
	header("Content-type: application/x-msdownload");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=log.csv");
	header("Pragma: no-cache");
	header("Expires: 0");
	echo $headers.$data;
} else {
	// Nothing needed to be output. Put an error message here or something.
	echo 'No data available for this CSV.';
}
?>

As you will see in this tutorial I have continued to use the parseCSVComments() function from the previous tutorial. This ensures that your data is going to come out how you want it to appear in the CSV.

The best part about this script is that any table you put in the query on line 14 will be the headers and data in the CSV. No need to hand type out all the table headers unless you want to comment that section out and put in your own. So if you have a table full of users that includes: name, email, website, phone you could create a query like:

SELECT name, email, website, phone FROM users

This would pull only those fields to the CSV if you had other data like passwords, nicknames or instant messenger addresses in the same table.

Enjoy!

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/37/feed 15 Export data to CSV (Comma Separated Value) http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/36 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/36#comments Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:26:11 +0000 Daniel http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/36

An updated posting on this subject can be found at:
Creating a CSV file with PHP

Ever needed export data to a CSV file (Comma Separated Value)? If you don’t know what a CSV is it is a bunch of values that are separated by a , . An example is:

first value, second value, third value
fourth value, fifth value, sixth value

Every value before a comma is new cell in the spreadsheet and everything after each new line is the start of a new row. The above would produce something like:

first value second value third value
fourth value fifth value sixth value

To accomplish this in PHP you can go about things two ways: arrays or strings.

The array approach:

<?php
$row[] = 'first value';
$row[] = 'second value';
$row[] = 'third value';
$data .= join(',', $row)."\n"; // Join all values without any trailing commas and add a new line

$row = ''; // We must clear the previous values
$row[] = 'fourth value';
$row[] = 'fifth value';
$row[] = 'sixth value';
$data .= join(',', $row)."\n";

// Output the headers to download the file
header("Content-type: application/x-msdownload");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=log.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo $data;
?>

Using strings:

<?php
$row = 'first value,';
$row .= 'second value,';
$row .= 'third value';
$data .= $row."\n";

$row = 'fourth value,';
$row .= 'fifth value,';
$row .= 'sixth value';
$data .= $row."\n";

// Output the headers to download the file
header("Content-type: application/x-msdownload");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=log.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo $data;
?>

The problem with using strings to create the CSV file is you have to pay attention to the last value in each row and strip out the last comma or not insert the last comma. You will also notice in the string version the $row .= ‘value’;
The period before the = adds that value to the previous $row value.

On the next page I will show you how to handle line breaks, quotes and commas in your data.

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/36/feed 8 Website uptime check http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/30 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/30#comments Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:07:46 +0000 Daniel http://wlscripting.com/tutorial/30 Do you ever want to check many websites to see if they are up or not? This code can help you check multiple sites all from one page.

<?php
function prepWWW($url) {
  $replace = array("http://" => "", "www." => "");
  foreach($replace as $toReplace=>$replaceWith) {
    $url = str_replace($toReplace, $replaceWith, $url);
  }
  $parts = explode("/", $url);
  $newURL = strip_tags(addslashes($parts[0]));
  return $newURL;
}

$site = prepWWW("www.wlscripting.com");
$check = @fsockopen($site, 80);

if($check) {
  echo "$site is up";
} else {
  echo "$site is down";
}
?>

First off we create the prepWWW function. This just prepares the domain name for usage with fsockopen(). We strip out all extra parts to the url so we only get the main domain like: wlscripting.com NOT http://www.wlscripting.com

Then we just check the website with fsockopen() on port 80, which is the port that Apache or IIS runs on usually unless you configured it differently. This 80 can be changed to any other port number to checking other services like: FTP 21, cPanel 2082, WHM 2086, and so on.

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/30/feed 8 Users Online http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/24 http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/24#comments Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:05:19 +0000 Daniel http://wlscripting.com/tutorial/24 Keeping track of how many users have been on your website is very easy. This can be done with some basic MySQL code and the date() function. All you have to do is keep track of the users IP address and time they were last on the page. Lets get to some code:

<?
$server = 'localhost';
$user = 'root';
$pass = '';
$db2 = 'online';

$db = mysql_connect($server, $user, $pass) or die("Could not connect.");
if(!$db) 
	die("no db");
if(!mysql_select_db("$db2",$db))
 	die("No database selected.");
$server_time=date("U");
$client_ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM current_users WHERE ip='$client_ip'");
$check = mysql_fetch_array($query);
if($check) {
	$update="UPDATE current_users set time='$server_time' where ip='$check[ip]'";
	mysql_query($update) or die("Unable to process update: " . mysql_error());
} else {
  $sql = "INSERT INTO `current_users` (`ip`, `time`) VALUES ('$client_ip', '$server_time')";
  $result = mysql_query($sql) or die("Unable to process insert: " . mysql_error());
}
$time=$server_time-1800;
$remove = "DELETE from current_users WHERE time<'$time'"; // Remove users outside time limit
mysql_query($remove) or die("Unable to delete: " . mysql_error());

// Show the count
$sql2 = mysql_query("SELECT ip FROM current_users" );
$currentVisitors = mysql_num_rows($sql2);
echo 'There have been '.$currentVisitors.' users online in the last 30 minuets.';
?>

The first query checks to see if your IP address is in the database. If your IP address is in the database it updates the time. If your IP address is not in the database, we then insert the time and your IP address.

To eliminate old users we automatically remove users who have been online after 30 minutes(1800 Seconds). If you want to change the time delay just multiply 60 times the number of minutes.
10 Minutes = 600
15 Minutes = 900
20 Minutes = 1200
30 Minutes = 1800
1 Hour = 3600

Make sure you create a database and apply your settings to the variables at the top.
Insert the following SQL query into your database:

CREATE TABLE `current_users` (
`ip` varchar(30) NOT NULL default ”,
`time` varchar(30) NOT NULL default ”
) TYPE=MyISAM;

Just save this as online.php and include this in your page.

]]> http://www.wlscripting.com/tutorial/24/feed 3