This function calculates how many lines will text occupy.
Example (simple):


$string = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Phasellus tincidunt posuere dolor";

$num_lines = how_many_lines(10, $string);

It accepts a third, optional, parameter $options, that allows you to change behaviour. $options should be array. Following configuration options are available:

'white_spaces' - default: array(' ', "\t") - array of chars, that should be treated as whitespace.

'new_lines' - default: array("\r\n", "\n") - array of strings, that should be treated as newlines. For example, for HTML you can set 'new_lines' => array('');

'force_line_breaks' - default: true - force wrapping, when the token is longer than width, or not. If set to false, and token cannot be fitted into $width, function will return false;

'callback' - default: null - callback function for determining character width. Must accept at least one parameter - $char

'callback_params' - default: array() - optional additional callback parameters

'char_widths' - default: null - associative array in a form $char => $width, which contains char width. If $char is not found in the array, it's width is defaulted to 0.

This code, working with MovableType, creates a tag cloud of tags entered into the keyword field of a blog entry. You can see the results and read my write-up which explains some other things that help with MovableType and tag clouds. I got this code from Al-Muhajabah and made a few minor tweaks. Put the PHP snippet below inside a MT template that creates a php page.

This multiple-use PHP script will randomly generate content based on a randomly generated number.

This is a simple PHP script that will show whether a certain port/socket of a certain computer is currently open/active.

Ping, PingOMatic service for an updated. Requires: The Inutio XML-RPC Library.

Connect to MySQL db & display result from Table query

Fixed missing $ sign.

This only seems appropriate, we were fighting with a similar issue this morning.

I use this method for keeping my sql templates away from my code.

You can extend upon the idea, as I have done in the past, by placing SQL handing classes between your scripts and the template library.

Things to note here:

The lesser userd heredoc string method. The reason this is used is to keep the SQL clear and well laid out, and not as messy as using quotes.

vsprintf() is a very handy function if you don't want to hard code the number of parameters to interpolate your string with.

The use of sprintf templates offers you additional security. For example, only allowing numbers to be placed where a %d falls. This, of course, shouldn't be the only security on user supplied variables, but comes in extra handy for debugging purposes.

Regarding the TODO in there, it would take a check of the number of % placeholders there are in the template. One caveat is remembering to remove the count of %%'s that appear (the literal percentage).

Using the extract() Functio