PHP Tips & Tutorials – Page 3

PHP: Get the File Uploading Limit – Max File Size Allowed to Upload

16 Comments / PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / February 23, 2010

PHP file upload max size is determined by 3 configuration values in php.ini, namely upload_max_filesize, post_max_size and memory_limit. You can get the maximum file size allowed in uploading by this snippet: $max_upload = (int)(ini_get(‘upload_max_filesize’)); $max_post = (int)(ini_get(‘post_max_size’)); $memory_limit = (int)(ini_get(‘memory_limit’)); $upload_mb = min($max_upload, $max_post, $memory_limit); Wherein $upload_mb is the maximum file size allowed for upload …

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PHP: Display Current Year to Automatically Update Copyright Years

1 Comment / PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / February 23, 2010

I guess most of the websites out there are using plain strings for the years of footer copyright because many of them are still showing 2009 right now. If you have quite a few websites as I do, it’d be kind of intimidating to manually update the copyright years for all of them. So why …

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PHP: Allow Specific HTML Tags in Text Input Controls of HTML Forms, <textarea>, <input type=”text” />

6 Comments / Information Security, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / February 15, 2010

Textarea and text input are common html form controls that accept text input. They can be a security challenge as they allow the user to enter anything they want. If you just go about using whatever data the user has entered, your application is anything but secure. Some sort of filtering / white-listing must be …

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PHP: Why you should use dirname(FILE).‘/include.php’ instead of just ‘include.php’

5 Comments / PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / February 9, 2010

When you need to include or require a php file that is in the same directory as the currently running one, most people come up with this simple line in the current script: include(‘include.php’); While this approach doesn’t present obvious breaches, it is slightly inefficient than the following way: include(dirname(__FILE__).’/include.php’); You will type a little …

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PHP: Subject String Length Limit of Regular Expression Matching Functions

1 Comment / PHP Tips & Tutorials, Regular Expression Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / December 12, 2009

Here’s a quick tip for those who have encountered this very same problem that all regular expression functions of PHP such as preg_match() and preg_replace() stop working when the input string (subject string to be searched or matched) is too long or large. If you believe your regular expressions should work but didn’t and the …

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A Simple PHP Contact Form Script

7 Comments / Free PHP Classes & Library, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / December 10, 2009

Update: Other than using the code outlined on this page, you may also want to download the Kavoir Contact Form script to be readily usable on your website. It’s also a free one and a rather easy one too. You should be able to do it yourself. To create a working contact form, you need …

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Best way to hide and cloak your affiliate links?

10 Comments / Affiliate Programs, Make Money Online, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / September 19, 2009

One may first think of using JavaScript to do this by dynamically changing the windows status bar URL, but unfortunately this trick doesn’t work across Firefox browsers. The truth is the visitor or clicker will eventually find out that they’ve been referred to the affiliate merchant by you from the ultimate landing URL — sometimes …

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How to redirect the visitor to another page or website?

1 Comment / CSS & HTML Tips, JavaScript Tips & Tutorials, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / September 3, 2009

This is one of the most common tasks in website development and also one of the most frequently asked question according to some of the keyword research tools. Well, you have 3 ways to achieve a web page redirection. Use PHP header() function to modify and send a HTTP Location header: header("Location: /thankyou.html"); // redirect …

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PHP, JavaScript: Stop and prevent others from framing your site or web page

3 Comments / JavaScript Tips & Tutorials, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / August 30, 2009

Though it does increase traffic and the pageviews, it doesn’t feel quite good with someone who’s loading your website or page as a part of theirs in the form of a <frame> or <iframe>, leeching your content as part of theirs. To prevent them from loading your pages this way, and make the visitor browser …

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PHP: Session ID changes automatically at every request / page load

PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / August 26, 2009

Ideally the initial session id will remain the same throughout a session unless the developer has explicitly asked PHP to change it by the session_regenerate_id() function or the session_id() function. However, there’s a slight chance that you may encounter this problem of automatic changing session ID upon every new request when you are developing things …

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PHP: Email Attachment Class

44 Comments / Free PHP Classes & Library, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / August 6, 2009

You can send emails very easily with PHP by the help of mail() function, but how does one send attachment attached to that email? You’ll still use mail() function, but with a little more twists in the header argument — yes, the content of the attached file is actually encoded into the header of the …

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How to display HTML code on a web page?

15 Comments / CSS & HTML Tips, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / August 4, 2009

Web pages are made up of HTML code, so if you post or write some HTML code in a web pages, a browser would generally consider them normal code. Instead of showing them as they are literally, they have become part of the underlying HTML structure of that page. Now how to address this problem …

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One Simple Way to Encrypt, Obfuscate, Hide or Protect Your PHP Code

3 Comments / Information Security, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / August 4, 2009

This way is so simple that anyone who’s a beginner in PHP can use it immediately to obfuscate and hide the original PHP code. Generally, it’d make it much harder for someone to find a specific phrase in your code as it’s encrypted, though in a rather simple way using 4 PHP functions: gzinflate(), gzdeflate(), …

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PHP: Count Words in a String

PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / July 29, 2009

A quick tip here for counting the number of words in a string. For example, when you need to determine if a submitted string is too short to be considered in inclusion or further processing. $str = ‘How to get the number of words in a string?’; $num = str_word_count($str, 0); // $num = 10 …

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A few suggestions of good practices for accelerating PHP development

1 Comment / PHP Tips & Tutorials, Programming Tips & Insights / By Yang Yang / July 6, 2009

The slow and steady may win, but the fast and steady dominate. The old saying of faster not always being better may go well in other fields, but not in the IT world of today. Faster is absolutely better. You should by all means try to improve yours or your team’s programming proficiency and accelerate …

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Work Around Zend Studio 5.5 PHP Class / Object / Method Auto-complete Problem

2 Comments / PHP Tips & Tutorials, Web Applications & Online Software / By Yang Yang / June 20, 2009

Don’t know if it’s a glitch of Zend itself but I frequently encounter this problem on Windows with Zend Studio when writing PHP. Function / object methods names auto-completion saves a lot of time by suggesting candidates and a quick flyover tooltip with the synopsis, however sometimes it doesn’t work with newly created functions and …

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Best PHP Books for Learning PHP Development and Programming (with MySQL)

10 Comments / LAMP Developer Books, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / June 17, 2009

PHP is by far the most popular and easiest to use web programming language in the world. If your goal is to enter PHP programming and development as a novice beginner and start from the very basics, these books are reviewed the best by actual readers. Some of the books contain chapters dealing with MySQL, …

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PHP, MySQL: Calculate Number of Days between 2 Dates or Number of Hours, Minutes and Seconds

1 Comment / PHP Tips & Tutorials, SQL / MySQL Tips and Tutorials / By Yang Yang / June 13, 2009

This is a rather common task in both PHP and MySQL, that is, to calculate and get the days distance (number of days) between 2 given dates. In PHP, to get the number of days between now and a future date / a past date: $days = abs(strtotime(“2011-11-20”) – strtotime(date(“Y-m-d”))) / (60 * 60 * …

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PHP: Run .CSS files as PHP

2 Comments / .htaccess Tutorials & Tips, PHP Tips & Tutorials / By Yang Yang / June 9, 2009

Most of time we need to run some other mime types as PHP in Apache web server, such as run PHP code in HTML files, we want to Apache to parse that particular type of file so that PHP code in them are recognized and executed. Though from the external viewers’ point of view, such …

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MySQL, PHP: Display MySQL table fields and data

8 Comments / PHP Tips & Tutorials, SQL / MySQL Tips and Tutorials / By Yang Yang / June 6, 2009

While this may seem simple, but it’s more complicated than it may appear because you have to first decide which data (rows, fields, etc.) to be extracted or selected and in what way the data from the MySQL table are presented. But to simply read from a MySQL table for the fields and data: SELECT …

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