Chob » PHP

Loop through XML elements using PHP

chop — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:33:57 +0000

If you don’t know the absolute path of an element in your xml file the using xpath and ‘//’ acts as a wildcard (similar to ‘..’ in as3 i guess) you can run a loop and return all values for those elements.

Handy for this likes RSS feeds or KML files ect.

xpath('//xmlnode')  as $node) {
    	echo "\t node: $node 
\n";

	}
?>

Handy Hint: AMFPHP to Flash Character Encoding

chop — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 03:11:41 +0000

If you’ve ever used AMFPHP to connect your DB into Flash, you may stumble across weird characters being output! eg: â€“ 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.

PHP – having problems with getimagesize() when space in filename?

chop — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:09:22 +0000

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 Snippet – GetFileContents and save PDF

chop — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 03:51:28 +0000

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 Snippet – Get Yesterdays date

chop — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:43:05 +0000

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;
}

PHP Snippet – Time difference between 2 date/time stamps.

chop — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:03:25 +0000

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;
 }