Bill Richards » PHP

PHP base_convert() in AS3

Bill — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:10:39 +0000

Here is a quick example of how to use PHP’s base convert function in AS3. A lot of people use this function for shorter masked URLs like YouTube. Easy enough but took me a minute to find the equivalent in actionscript.

PHP:

function encode36($x){
    return base_convert($x, 10, 36);
}
function decode36($x){
    return base_convert($x, 36, 10);
}

Actionscript 3:

function encode36(x:Number):String{
    return x.toString(36);
}
function decode36(x:String):int {
    return parseInt(x,36);
}

PHP: Check if a URL exists with cURL

Bill — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:44:34 +0000

In my previous post about email validation one user pointed out that this will not actually validate if a website’s domain actually exists. Here is a simple function that will do just that, determine if a website exists using PHP and cURL.

Edit: After searching a bit, I found another similar cURL solution that checks the actual headers. Since cURL can return HTTP code I don’t think all that extra code is necessary? I could be wrong!

function urlExists($url=NULL)
	{
		if($url == NULL) return false;
		$ch = curl_init($url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
		$data = curl_exec($ch);
		$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
		curl_close($ch);
		if($httpcode>=200 && $httpcode<300){
			return true;
		} else {
			return false;
		}
	}

Getting Upcoming Birthdays From MySQL

Bill — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:51:52 +0000

Assuming you have a table called `users` with birthday as `bday` for the column name, this will pull all users who are having a birthday in the next 7 days. This is very useful if you want to showcase your member’s birthdays on your website.

SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE  DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) <= dayofyear(`bday`) AND DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) +7 >= dayofyear(`bday`) LIMIT 30;

There is of course one small problem with this, it’s not sorted. If we sort by `bday` ASC it’ll still be off since user’s are born on different years. What we really want is to sort by month and day only. I’m sure this can be done in MySQL but here is a PHP solution to take care of it.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE  DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) <= dayofyear(`bday`) AND DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) +7 >= dayofyear(`bday`) LIMIT 30;";
$query = mysql_query($sql);
$rows = mysql_num_rows($query);
if(!empty($rows)){
	while($resultFind = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
		$arr[] = array('bday' => $resultFind['bday'], 'bday2' => date("md", strtotime($resultFind['bday'])));
	}
}

function compare($x, $y) {
	if ( $x["bday2"] == $y["bday2"] )
	 return 0;
	else if ( $x["bday2"] < $y["bday2"] )
	 return -1;
	else
	 return 1;
}

usort($arr, "compare");

Using usort() we can sort based on the month and day. You now have your list sorted

PHP5 Email Validation

Bill — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:44:20 +0000

In prior version of PHP you had to use some regex solution to validate an email address, now in PHP5 it’s as simple as:

function isValidEmail($email){
 return filter_var(filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL), FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
}

if(isValidEmail('email@domain.com')){
//valid
} else {
//not valid
}

I’ve been using PHP5 ever since it was released but didn’t look into the PECL Filter extension until recently. Pretty handy.

Please note that I also added the FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL filter which removes all illegal e-mail characters from a string. This is not needed if you only want to validate and not clean the input.

Sphinx : A MySQL full-text search engine

Bill — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:00:39 +0000

This has got to be one of the coolest things I have come across in a long time. Sphinx a standalone MySQL full-text search engine. I’ve been working with it for a couple weeks now and I must say, this thing is blazin’ fast. I was most impressed by performance on large data sets (60+ million rows). Even when preforming sorts, it’s really fast. Oh, they have a PHP API too! If you’re looking to super charge your mysql search, give it a shot!