If you’ve ever used AMFPHP to connect your DB into Flash, you may stumble across weird characters being output! eg: – replaces the ’. The simple explanation is that the PHP is decoding it wrong.

Forget about preg_replace(), all you need to do is update your amfphp/gateway.php file to decode, encode in UTF-8.

$gateway->setCharsetHandler("utf8_decode", "UTF-8", "UTF-8");

and walla no more annoying characters sent from AMFPHP.

Some images containing spces in the file name led me to some errors when trying to determine their image size for manipulation using PHP.

Simply url encoding the string fixed this problem.
 

 <?php
  $imagePath = "some funky filename.jpg";
  $imagePath = str_replace(" ","%20",$imagePath);
  list($imgwidth,$imgheight) = getimagesize($imagePath);
?>

I needed to be able to access a pdf outside my document root… so I created the script below. Using just file_get_contents with an echo would just save it as the name of the script, using an $output_file variable and in the header you are able to specify what you want to save it as.

<?php
$output_file = 'outfilename.pdf';
$file = "target.pdf";
$fileDir = '../target/directory/';
$contents = file_get_contents($fileDir.$file);
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=" . $output_file);
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
echo $contents;
exit();
?>

This is a simple function that returns yesterdays date. Simple but handy.

function yesterday()
{
 $yesterday = date("Y:m:d",mktime(0,0,0,date("m") ,date("d")-1,date("Y")));
 return $yesterday;
}

In a recent project I needed to capture how long the user spent on the application, it was not expected they would spend days on it so it return hours minutes seconds which can be saved to a database.
So basically here is a function to do that…

//
echo getTimeDifference("2010-02-26 18:35:36");

function getTimeDifference($start_time){

 //convert $start_time into a usable string
 $tempStart = preg_replace('/(\d{2})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})(.*)/', '$1:$2:$3:$4',$start_time);
 $tempStart=explode(":",$tempStart);

 $year = $tempStart[0];
 $month= $tempStart[1];
 $day = $tempStart[2];
 $hour = $tempStart[3];
 $minute = $tempStart[4];
 $second = $tempStart[5];

 //set the end time as current time
 $timesEnd = date("Y:m:d:H:i:s");
 $tempEnd=explode(":",$timesEnd);

 $year1 = $tempEnd[0];
 $month1= $tempEnd[1];
 $day1 = $tempEnd[2];
 $hour1 = $tempEnd[3];
 $minute1 = $tempEnd[4];
 $second1 = $tempEnd[5];

 $countdown_date = mktime($hour, $minute, $second, $month, $day, $year);
 $countdown_date1 = mktime($hour1, $minute1, $second1, $month1, $day1, $year1);

 $diff = $countdown_date1 -$countdown_date ;
 if ($diff < 0)
 $diff = 0;
 $dl = floor($diff/60/60/24);
 $hl = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24)/60/60);
 $ml = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24 - $hl*60*60)/60);
 $sl = floor(($diff - $dl*60*60*24 - $hl*60*60 - $ml*60)
 );

 $timeDifference = "$hl:$ml:$sl";

 return $timeDifference;
 }