Best use of ob_, custom error handling, and variable variales evar: simple templating.

_parse($filename[,$locals])
includes $filename and renders its output to the return value. $locals, if used, will add a set of variables to the included context.

Parse($template[,$locals])
Same as above, but allows you to define a base template folder and omit the .php - just for cleaner code.

t($template[,$obj])
...
t()
Same as Parse, but any output between the opening call and the closing call (no arguments) will be buffered intot he $content variable of the template.

Play around with t(..) to find out more; I don't feel like documenting it.

My previous entry on an easy to use SQLite interface for XUL/JS got me thinking: how many times have I had to write functions that were just wrappers for a little SQL?

Below is the fruits of that little query (excuse the pun). Forgive the dbXXX functions; my implementation depended on a small portion of a larger mysql library that I've grown accustomed to coding with.

A simple function (with support) that can provide the backbone to any templating system.

Simple. It's parse_url, from PHP, implemented in Javascript. Seen a lot of similar ones around the web, but they were all bulky code and none of them took advantage of the RegEx parser in JS.

Applied as a member of the String prototype, so just call as myURL.parseURL(); Will return a named object with naming identical to that of PHP's function.

Additional: if first argument is present, will break the querystring up into name/value pairs, unescaped, and return that instead of the raw querystriing.

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/

If it's a .php page, you can simply include this file where you want a hit counter to appear.

One file - text output. Very simple, very easy. Based off the filename of the page (creates a pagename.counter file to hold the count).
(No use for it myself - made it for a friend).

This detects screen resolution using javascript and makes it available to php by way of cookies.

Use this to print alternating values from an array.

It cycles through a series of values based on an iteration number.

For example, you could use this for alternating background colors.

Well after searching the internet for something similar to this, I didn't come up with anything...so I made my own! This simple script will track your members' time spent on your website. Please feel free to give comments/suggestions/feedback.

This is the final version of my Javascript serializer targetted at PHP.

The point:

Objects are most easily passed over the network as serialized strings. Between serialization and unserialization, serialization is by far the easier of the two. Since object passing can sometimes be a process-hungry thing, we want to do things as quickly as possible.

My solution is to always do the hard part in compiled code, while doing the easy part in script. That is, whichever way you're passing an Object, you want to pass it in a natively decoded format for the target.

Since I work mostly in PHP, this meant writing a module that would be able to generate a string that can be decoded with PHP's unserialize() function into a PHP Associative Array (or other applicable type).

Notes:

This lib REQUIRES the Prototype lib. You can hack prototype out of it, of course (by replacing the references to Object.extend() with explicit assignments), but I can't imagine why you'd want to bother; it's used mostly with Ajax.Request anyway.

Previous versions of this code would add the .toPHP() member to the Object prototype. After trying to enumerate things, I found that this is a REALLY bad thing to do, as toPHP springs up where it's not wanted in ALL objects. As a result, I've opted to go the Prototype route and apply it as a member of the Object object.

Please note that if you pass a serialized string to PHP via GET or POST, you'll need to stripslashes() before unserialization.

Javascript sample of use:

var myObject = {
name:'value',
test:['Array','of','strings'],
bool:false,
timestamp: new Date(),
float: 3.1415926539,
number: 42,
func: function () {
alert('Member functions are always omitted from serialization');
}
}
alert(Object.toPHP(myObject));

Output:

a:7:{s:4:"name";s:5:"value";s:4:"test";a:3:{i:0;s:5:"Array";i:1;s:2:"of";i:2;s:7:"strings";}s:4:"bool";b:0;s:9:"timestamp";i:1190897619824;s:5:"float";d:3.1415926539;s:6:"number";i:42;s:4:"func";null}

Sample of subsequent unserialization in PHP (passed via POST as 'myobject')

$myObject=unserialize(stripslashes($_POST['myobject']));
var_dump($myObject);

Output:

array(7) {
["name"]=>
string(5) "value"
["test"]=>
array(3) {
[0]=>
string(5) "Array"
[1]=>
string(2) "of"
[2]=>
string(7) "strings"
}
["bool"]=>
bool(false)
["timestamp"]=>
int(1192296601)
["float"]=>
float(3.1415926539)
["number"]=>
int(42)
["func"]=>
NULL
}