This post assumes you've created a project with Google's web console and downloaded a client_secret.json file from the credentials page. If not, more info is here.. https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/google-spreadsheets-and-php.html Note: The tuto...

There is no built in function for taking a multi dimensional array in PHP and flattening it into a single array. However, it's pretty easy to accomplish in a one liner. Here is the code ...

PHP has some default limits that do not work out of the box when you want to work with uploading very large files. So there are a few configuration changes you have to make to the defaults that come with PHP. These are defined in you php.ini file. The...

Here is a quick snippet for parsing query strings in PHP. You can use the `parse_url` and `parse_str` methods. `parse_str` will create a variable for you populated with results. $url = "http://www.seanbehan.com/path/?param=key"; parse_str(parse_url...

It's short and sweet. $obj_from_array = (object)['key'=>'val']; echo $obj_from_array->key;

Here is a quick way to express a chance of something happening. This is an example in JavaScript that gives you a 1 in 3 chance of being true. [true, false, false].sort(function(){ return Math.random() >= 0.5 ? 1 : -1 })[0] Basically, we popu...

If you would like to force a file download prompt to the user, instead of just outputting the text to the browser, use the following headers. ...

Here is a one liner for using XPATH with HTML in PHP $doc = new DOMXPath(@DOMDocument::loadHTML(file_get_contents("https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/"))); Now you can use XPATH to query the html.. foreach($doc->query("//a") as $el){ echo $el->no...

Calculate age in PHP $your_birthday = '1982-08-29'; $difference = date_diff(date_create(), date_create($your_birthday)); $age = $difference->format('%Y'); // 35 Short and sweet

You can write reusable scripts with Postgres by taking advantage of named variables. A named variable starts with a `:` in your sql script. Here is an example select :a_number You can then use this statement with `psql` and the `--variable` fl...

Use this snippet for grabbing a random item from an array in php $fruits = ['apple', 'banana', 'carrot', 'date', 'elderberry']; echo array_rand(array_flip($fruits)); // => 'banana' PHP's `array_flip` makes the keys the values and the valu...

Unfortunately PHP's PDO constructor doesn't take a database connection url (in a format that Heroku makes available as a config var) as an argument. It has its own, rather odd syntax. However, it's easy enough to extract url parts with the `parse_url`...

Here is a snippet for generating a URL friendly slug in PHP function slugify($string){ return strtolower(trim(preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9-]+/', '-', $string), '-')); } And you can use it in your code like so ...

Here is a little snippet for generating a UUID in PHP 7 function uuid(){ $data = random_bytes(16); $data[6] = chr(ord($data[6]) & 0x0f | 0x40); $data[8] = chr(ord($data[8]) & 0x3f | 0x80); return vsprintf('%s%s-%s-%s-%s-%s%s%s', str_...

Below is an example URL structure with rewrite rules using an Apache .htaccess file. GET /a/ => a/index.php GET /a/b/ => a/b/index.php GET /a/b/c/ => a/b/index.php This URL mapping will give you pretty URLs in PHP without needing t...

Here is a Regex for extracting URLs from text. However, these links will not already be hyperlinked or source attribtues from images or iframes. This example is in PHP. I was trying to format a Wordpress page to auto hyperlink but preserve embeded ima...

I just wrote and published my first PHP package on Packagist.com. It's available on [packagist.org](https://packagist.org/packages/htmlxpath/htmlxpath) and the source code is on [github](https://github.com/seanbehan/htmlxpath). To install the package u...

You need to find which configuration ini file has been loaded by PHP. The easiest way to do this is to run the phpinfo() function from the command line. php -r "phpinfo(); " | grep -i "loaded configuration file" You should see something like...

> This post is out of date - Heroku officially supports PHP now w/ buildpacks Heroku runs Apache version 2.2.22 PHP version 5.3.10 Deploying Wordpress to Heroku requires that you throw the Wordpress source into a Git repository. So download th...

After an hour of fruitless searching through the docs and forums, I finally found an answer to my simple question, of course buried in the depths of the shark infested, murky water that is the Moodle code base . How do I check if a user is a course creat...

Arguably the most important function in the Moodle API, is the create_course function. One would think... after all Moodle is an LMS. Courses are the bread and butter for course management platforms, right? Taking a look at the function in the course/lib....

I wrote a review for Joseph Thibault's Moodle News on extension development for Moodle. The book is quite good and I think an essential resource for anyone wanting to develop in Moodle. The book focuses on plugin development, but it will also give you an ...

Why are PHP namespaces defined using a backslash? It looks ugly. Unless of course, there is a good reason for the "\"? Does this namespaced code run more efficiently on Windows? Since namespaces are new in PHP5 why not take the opportunity to use them wh...

Here is how to install a Rails application out of a subdirectory (rather than as a subdomain) with the Apache web server(Apache2). In this example I'm going to use my own blog which is a Wordpress installation and serve a Rails application from the subdir...

If you want to insert a datetime that matches the default mysql datetime type format use this date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

Simple script for posting a valid response back to Paypal service after a sale is completed using the Paypal Instant Checkout payment method. <?php // read the post from PayPal system and add 'cmd' $req = 'cmd=_notify-validate'; foreach ($_POST as $k...

Listing all files and directories using PHP 5. <?php $files = array(); $dir = dir("."); while(false!==($file=$dir->read())): if(($file{0}!=".") && ($file{0}!="~") && (substr($file, -3)!="LCK") && ($file!=basename($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]))): ...

Function for highlighting text/strings in PHP. $content = file_get_contents("http://php.net/"); print highlight("PHP", $content); function highlight($match, $string){ return str_ireplace($match, "<span style='background:yellow'>$match</span&...

I was in the market for a simple php script to replace hrefs with their absolute paths from scraped web pages. I wrote one myself. I used the preg_replace_callback function so that I could pass the parsed results as a single variable. <?php $domain =...

I wanted to create a button for the TinyMCE Rich Text Editor for Wordpress. It was tough to find good docs on the subject. There are a couple of useful posts out there but in general I found them lacking. http://codex.wordpress.org/TinyMCE_Custom_Buttons...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5EIrSM8dCA[/youtube]