This function is useful in helping to deter spam bots by obfuscating things such as e-mail addresses and URLs that are displayed on a web page. While it's not 100% fool proof, it does offer some protection.

Example:
$email = html_entitize('foo@baz.org');
/*
Outputs foo@baz.com
*/

A quick and simple function to dump a variable (array, object, string, int, etc) out into -formatted output for a web browser.

If the variable is an array or an object, you can have it returned into the another variable for later processing (i.e., through templates or e-mail). Due to lack of free time, if the variable is not an array or an object, it will ignore the $return value and print directly to output.

Future revisions will add the above mentioned functionality.

If you've ever wanted to build an application that can both find the distance between two zip codes, and find zip codes within a specific radius of another zip code, then this is the snippet for you.

I've tried to build this before using PHP4 and MySQL 4 and have found it to be painfully slow for a one-user connection over a Local Area Network (LAN). So, before you continue reading, I must make it abundantly clear that this method requires PHP 5 and MySQL 5.

This is because in PHP5, we will need the MySQL-Improved interfaces, and in MySQL 5, we will need functions and procedures.

Using functions and procedures in MySQL puts the weight of the calculations on MySQL, where they will run hundreds of times faster than if PHP were to attempt to do the work. In addition, using functions and procedures is still hundreds of times faster than carefully crafted SQL statements (one benchmark took over 10 seconds using a WHERE clause, while the function + procedure method took around .12 seconds--note the dot).

Since I am not a mathematician by trade, I found the necessary calculations using Google.

For the "Great Circle Distance" formula, I used Meridian Word Data's website. For the radius finder, I used another that unfortunately I do not have off the top of my head right now. I will look for it again and repost it for proper accreditation.

For the zip code database, I am using the free zip code database from CFDynamics.

Below, you will find the database and table schema, the functions and procedures, and also a demo PHP script to see all of this put into action. As a courtesy, you may download a dump of this database from my website. It's uncompressed size is 3.4M, and it's compressed size is 537K. The checksum is available here.

Please leave me comments, suggestions, questions, and/or rants about this snippet. I feel this is a very useful bit of code, and hope that others out there may find as much use from it as I will be.

A function that will either read a file or read a string, and parse a random line from it. Very simple.

Software Requirements:

Crypt_HMAC:
http://pear.php.net/package/Crypt_HMAC
HTTP_REQUEST:
http://pear.php.net/package/HTTP_Request
PEAR:
http://pear.php.net/

The below is an old bit of code I threw together when I was developing a Friend Networking site back in 2001. The site didn't last all that long, but I did manage to save all the handy snippets I used in it.

Below is code, which will return the age of somebody, when you parse their date of birth to it. I will probably make a cleaner version of the code at a later date and share it with everyone here.

Below is a bit of code, which I needed to make when creating an application which did a lot of file manipulation. If you ever want to load the contents of a file, but remove X amount of lines from the end of the file, use the function below.

Below is a very simple bit of code you can use to test a MySQL Database Connection.

Before any wars start, I want to clarify that the code below is NOT my own code, but unfortunately I am uncertain where I obtained it from. The code below basically create dynamic thumbnails of an image, you parse the following to it:

Image location,
Maximum Width
Maximum Height

It will then scale your image down, please do not confuse this with converting your image into a square, or whatever shape you are after. The code below will maintain aspect ratio of your image, and will use the values you parse as a guidline. Extremely handy when you are building gallery websites.

The below may be a simple line of code, but it is extremely useful to help prevent SQL Injection. There are many other methods, such as removing certain values from your string, but this is by far superior, as it does not limit what can be inserted to your database.