If you are developing PHP code for a website you might sometimes want to check which version of Apache or PHP will be running the website. This is particularly true if you use some functionality that was included at a particular revision of the software or if you want to avoid security holes that were…
If your website has a lot of images it is often convenient to create and show a dynamic thumbnail image. This will save on processor and download time for your visitors and they only have to download the images they want to see. One great tool to do this is the GD library. Before you…
When you are working on your website, you will sometimes want to change the level of error reporting that your code returns. This is a great way to get full diagnostic information so that you can fix a problem in your latest piece of code, but be careful to only show error reporting on your…
When you are developing or supporting a website, it does not always work perfectly. Sometimes a visitor will abort a script that is running and when that happens you want to try and avoid that causing a client disconnect. The ignore_user_abort() function determines whether the remote client can abort the running of the script. This…
Lots of international websites now need to display prices in a number of different local currencies. As a web developer, it does not matter if your visitors are using US dollars, Euros, UK Pounds or Japanese Yen, you will want the currency to display properly for all of them. One of the best ways for…
Sometimes it is necessary to divert a visitor to a different page on your website or even an external site. This might be for a variety of reasons: Site maintenance Page retirement Incorrect URL Site busy or failed Automatically jump to first search result Moving to a different domain name In any of these scenario’s…
A simple but valuable feature of dynamic websites is displaying the current date and time. With PHP, this is easy to do with the date() and time() functions and is a great way for beginners to get their feet wet: Sometimes it is not sufficient to display the time in just your local time zone….
If you want to make sure your text is nicely formatted there are a couple of tricks using PHP that can help you. Changing the case of your words is one useful feature, that can be achieved with the functions in the following example. {code type=php} echo strtoupper(‘abc’); # outputs: ABC echo strtolower(‘ABC’); # outputs:…
No, this isn’t about getting frustrated with PHP and nuking your server… this is a couple of very useful (although hard to remember) array functions. explode() will take a string and give you an array, splitting that string on the delimiter you give. For example, if you have a list of comma-separated values, you will…
To find out the full details of any given variable in PHP, use the handy var_dump() function as follows: This will show you the PHP variable type, its value, and if it is an object or array. The structure and all information will be output recursively. The only slight disadvantage to using var_dump() is that…
