730 PHP Tutorials. Page 4

In the first segment of this two-part tutorial, I gave you a quick overview of some of the interesting new features available in phpMyAdmin. Starting with the basics of the installation process and proceeding to the intricacies of securing your instance of phpMyAdmin from prying eyes, changing the application s appearance and using its built-in reporting features to obtain information on who is using your MySQL RDBMS for what, I hope you re slowl...

There are many xml tutorials for php on the web, but few show how to parse xml using DOM. I would like to take this opportunity to show there is an alternative to the widespread SAX implementation for php programmers. DOM (Document Object Model) and SAX (Simple API for XML) have different philosophies on how to parse xml. The SAX engine is extremely event-driven. When it comes across a tag, it calls an appropriate function to handle it. This mak...

I started working with PHP six months ago. I used to read many articles in Internet that gave me better understanding on PHP. I started developing software for Online Journals that has the capability of searching document s contents. You can find articles in devarticles.com that can perform keyword title and author search. This article gives you a brief idea of Document-Based Search. What is Document Search? In a Dynamic Document Search every ...

In part 1, the article discussed document based searches that display results based on the number of search words found in each document. This article is an extension that ranks based on number of search words found plus number of occurrences of each search word in the document. To search for php tutorials and examples , the following table shows the title and occurrence of each search word in the document. Common words like is, was, and etc. a...

Did you ever have one of those sites that started out small, but kept growing and growing? Adding new pages to a site or removing old ones can often take more time than developing the pages themselves.

The Problem Sometimes you may need to generate a static version of your dynamically-generated web pages. For instance, you might have to produce a web-cd, or you might want to offer on your website a compressed version of some content to be downloaded and read off-line. In some cases, you could need to show a work-in-progress of a web site you are developing to someone who doesn t have a connection to the Internet (yes, sometimes it happens). Or ...

Ok. Your site has recorded the data you want, now you want to display it in an easy to read format. The first method that comes to mind is simply to put the data in an HTML table. Although this is probably the easiest way out, there is a much better way of displaying your information: a graph. This was originally only possible by using sneaky tables with tr s of different lengths. But now, thanks to the GD library and PHP, you can actually ...

One of the things you can do with PHP s many functions for image handling and manipulation is create an image watermarking class. This will allow you to add a watermark to images, which can be useful for a number of purposes. Keep reading to learn how.

This article describes an alternative way of converting XML to HTML using the SAX parser. For each tag you want to convert, you write a conversion function. This function is called with two arguments: contents and attributes. The return value of the function will replace the tag and its contents in the finished document. Introduction We all know it: XML is great. (If you don t, look at some of the great articles at this site.) But why is it so c...

In this article I will show how to generate dynamic XML documents with Object-Oriented PHP. Before I get started, let s get right to the heart of this functionality. Although the code may look fancy, being packaged up inside objects and inheritance, the key elements of this functionality rest in the the mysql_list_fields() and mysql_num_fields() functions. What they do is get a field list array and a column count for a given table in a database. ...

Tired of handcrafting configuration file manipulation tools for your Web application? Save yourself some time with patConfiguration, a PHP class designed to assist developers with reading, writing and maintaining application configuration files. The nice thing about the open-source community is that no matter how arcane your requirement, there s usually someone out there who s got a tool to help you meet it. It might not be the best tool in the w...

One of the latest crazes on the net has recently been online calendars. with the MCAL library and PHP, writing calendar applications is now easy and fully functional. The MCAL library is very similar to the c-client IMAP library. It offers a common simple interface for accessing calendars that can be stored in many different formats, both local and remote formats are supported. In this tutorial, we will use the mstore calendar driver. The mstor...

As PHP has grown and matured, so have the tools for PHP developers. Integrated development environment choices have never been greater. One such IDE is the open source Eclipse Platform. Eclipse, essentially a rewrite of Visual Age for Java, was a donation to the open source community by IBM and quickly became a household name in the Java world. Now, combined with the PHPEclipse plugin, Eclipse offers a world-class development environment for PHP...

Many applications in the field of Web development need to validate email addresses. While this can be done in a variety of ways, one simple but effective way involves writing your own functions in PHP. Alejandro Gervasio explains this approach.

In this second part of a two-part article, you ll learn how to manage email headers when creating a PHP email program, attach a file to a message, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter eight of the

Today we will discuss how to use special syntax to apply conditionals and loops. // ); //]] Embedding PHP in regular HTML If you have been paying attention to our earlier articles, you hopefully have picked up on how PHP can be embedded into a regular HTML document. For example, we should already know that the following is an example of how PHP is embedded: html head titleMy first PHP Page/title /head ...

Do you think that programming sockets with PHP is really hard work? Not at all. If you re still not convinced, read this final part of the series Handling sockets with PHP. In three parts, this series shows how to work with low-level sockets in PHP. It introduces some of the typical tasks, such as creating sockets, as well as reading and writing socket data.

When you are writing an object-based web application in PHP, you want to prevent your classes from being convoluted with input objects of the incorrect type. These input objects can cause the application to throw a fatal error. In this article, you will learn how to enforce object types in PHP 4.

This is the second installment of the series Enforcing object types in PHP. Welcome back. As you ll surely know, this three-part series goes through the basic concepts of object type enforcement in PHP 4/PHP 5. It explores different approaches for checking types of objects to help you avoid possible code contamination when objects of incorrect type are inputted within PHP classes.

Here we are again. Welcome to the last tutorial of the series Enforcing object types in PHP. As this article s title suggests, this series introduces the basics of object type enforcement in PHP, covering some of the most common methods for checking types of objects in both PHP 4 and PHP 5 respectively.

As with any programming language, when you code in PHP, it helps immensely if you set up your applications to handle errors gracefully. This article explores some of the most common error checking methods available in PHP, and provides hands-on examples that use different error handling methods.

Welcome to the last part of the series Error Handling in PHP. In two parts, this series introduces the basics of error handling in PHP. It demonstrates some of the most common methods for manipulating errors in PHP 4, and explains the implementation of exceptions in PHP 5, particularly in object-oriented environments.

In the first part of this article, I introduced you to PHP s error-handling functions, demonstrating how they could be used to control the manner in which errors are handled. I showed you how to use the error reporting functions to filter out those error types you didn t want to see, and how to use a custom error handler to catch PHP s notices and warnings. Finally, I wrapped things up with a demonstration of how a custom error handler could be u...

Do you want to know how to build an error logging system using the chain of responsibility schema with PHP? If your answer is a loud yes, then in this group of articles you ll find what you ve been looking for! Welcome to the concluding part of the series Understanding the chain of responsibility between PHP objects. This set of three tutorials shows you how to define a specific chain of responsibility that involves several PHP objects, and app...

Has your career as PHP developer led you to learn more about the most popular design patterns? If it has, then this series may help you get a better grounding in them. Welcome to the second installment of the series Introducing Visitor Objects in PHP 5. Made up of three articles, this series introduces the key points of how to apply the visitor pattern in PHP, and emphasizes the practical side of the topic by walking you though copious hands-on...

Interaction on the WWW often means filling out forms, hitting the submit button and getting a certain result. HTML and HTTP provide a mechanism to perform this quite easily through forms. PHP has support for this mechanism in a very convenient way. The values of each input field are stored in PHP variables, with the same name as the input field. A mechanism quite similar has been developed by Adobe, but for PDF documents. They simply call it Acr...

In my opinion, the best thing about working in the development phase is the liberty to throw your errors to the browser, without too many worries of prying eyes. Once your project is live, however, these errors can be very risky business and naturally they should be supressed. This carries with it the disadvantage of complicating the debugging process if something goes wrong. One great way to suppress these demons, without losing any valuable in...

We can find many articles related to uploading, viewing, and downloading files. This article is written on the basic concept of uploading and managing files. File uploading is the process of copying the file from your machine to the remote server. Other users of the same system then share this file by viewing or downloading it. What happens when you upload a file that already exists in the remote folder to which you are uploading?

Every time I ve written some code to upload a file, either to send it off as an email attachment or as an image for some dynamic content piece, I ve always meant to write a few functions so I don t have to write the code again. Well, people on the Back-end.org support board have been asking for the ability to add images to news and articles recently, so I *finally* sat down and wrote this script in order that I can add that functionality to the ...

We can find many articles related to file upload, view, download, etc. This article is written on this basic concept of uploading and managing files. File upload is a process of copying the file from your machine to the remote server. Other users of the system then share this file by viewing / downloading. What happens when I upload a file that already exists in the remote folder to which you are uploading? While discussing this problem, various ...

Are you interested in having at your disposal a quick reference for working with the DirectoryIterator class that comes with PHP 5? Then this might be the article that you ve been waiting for! Welcome to the second tutorial of the series A Close Look at the DirectoryIterator Class in PHP 5. Over the course of this set of installments, you ll find complete coverage of the most important methods bundled with this class, and learn how to take ad...

In the first installment of this occasional series introducing CakePHP, I extolled the virtues of web frameworks by showing you just how CakePHP can automate the implementation of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) interfaces. This is a great example of how a framework can greatly decrease development time, because CRUD interfaces are immensely useful no matter what sort of application you re building, are implemented in very much the same ...

The last two installments of this ongoing PHP series focused on the advantages of frameworks, demonstrating just how much time and effort they can eliminate doing otherwise tedious tasks such as building backend management scaffolds and performing forms validation. These tutorials focused on the increasingly popular CakePHP framework, however in this installment I ll switch gears a bit and instead examine my preferred framework solution: symfony...

A complete PHP application might contain upwards of dozens of individual script files, with hundreds of lines of code in each. Between all of those, there will be many instances where the same piece of code is reused: something as simple as outputting a string to the browser or as complex as making sure a user is logged in across multiple pages, and prompting them for login information if they are not. As you might imagine, copying the same code...

This month s article is aimed at PHP developers who re not yet familiar with the PHP superglobals. Usage of superglobals is fundamental to PHP web development, but, with all the recent changes in PHP, there are still many outdated tutorials, books, and sadly, still much confusion. PHP superglobals are automatically available throughout all scripts, in all scopes. In other words, you don t have to do anything, no declaring, no passing - they re j...

Iteration is a straightforward concept. Recursion is a bit more complicated; it can be defined as a regular function that calls itself. PHP supports recursive functions. This article, the first of three parts, will explain recursive functions and help you see why they are useful.

One thing I think many developers new to programming lack is a summary of the fundamentals. The experienced developers take certain concepts for granted - having a thorough understanding of how their systems work, they understand implicitly how certain code affects performance and other basic do s and don ts. The new developer, on the other hand, may not have the benefit of a formal programming education, and many programming tutorials assume a ...

Imagine that you re selling a digital product online. Maybe you ve written an article or a book and want to sell it on your site as a PDF. There are many ways one could do this, but one of the more convenient is to provide the user with a unique URL that only will work a limited number of times. This URL could, for example, be presented to the user (your client) on the last page of an orderflow, after payment has been made. We will look at code t...

Trying to expand beyond the boundaries of your existing background by learning how to code and use static methods and properties inside your PHP 5 classes? Then look no further. Welcome to the last part of the series Using static members and methods in PHP 5. Made up of two instructive chapters, this series introduces the foundations of using static members and defines static methods in PHP 5-driven development environments.

The problem Just today (1999/04/29), someone asked in the PHPBuilder discussion boards if there was a way to generate random but pronounceable passwords. I guess something like the ubiquitous passwords you find in each of the AOL CD-ROMs that litter our mailboxes :) In this article we will show how to do just that, with the constrains that we do not want to have number containing words in your output, and that we want to be able to specify the le...

Are you a curious PHP developer, wanting to learn how to simulate a basic Model-View-Controller schema with PHP? Then, look no further, because you re in the right place. Welcome to the final part of the series Simulating the Model-View-Controller Schema in PHP. In three tutorials, this series provides you with a comprehensive introduction, aimed at implementing a MVC-based relationship between PHP objects.

Unnecessary and balanced instantiation of PHP classes are issues that can be easily solved by using the flyweight design pattern. If you want to learn more about it, you should start reading this article. Welcome to the final part of the series Using the flyweight pattern with PHP 5. As you may have guessed, this series walks you through the implementation of this helpful pattern with PHP, and shows you how to apply it in concrete cases.

Did you ever get into a situation in Web development where you need to create a Web site or a Web application that is dynamically available, in several languages? A lot of existing open source applications try to create their own solution for these needs, but the standard way to do this is to use Gettext, a set of GNU tools to help packages manage multi-lingual messages in their applications. // ); //]] The majority of open source projects, suc...

Often in my articles I rave about the sheer number of functions available to the PHP programmer. This assertion has been once again enforced with the release of the Ming Flash Generation Library. This package, which also offers a PHP extension, provides PHP users with a rather convenient and simple way to create cool Flash animations. // ); //]] In this article, I ll introduce you to Ming as it applies to PHP, discuss installation procedures for...

One day, I found a site about Ming, a SWF output library and PHP module. Somehow, it attracted me, and gave me a driving force to try it immediately. I tried to read quickly to find things I d be able to download. I downloaded the source code, the examples, and the precompiled PHP module. When I don t have extra time, sometimes I think, why compile it myself if someone else has compiled it for me? Therefore, I fetched the compressed file, unco...

In this article, I will talk a little about installing and using InterBase with php4. It includes: Some words about Interbase Getting and installing InterBase Compiling/configuring php with InterBase support Creating an example database Some code examples Some Words About InterBase InterBase is around since the mid 80 s. The database has made a long way, and was eventually opensourced by by Borland/Inprise in July 2000. The version now available...

With the release of PHP5, there has been renewed interest in the PHP-GTK extension. What does the PHP-GTK extension provide? PHP-GTK implements language bindings for GTK+. PHP-GTK provides the means for a developer, familiar with PHP, to create rich clients using the PHP programming language. Installation Installation has already been cover in John Starkey s article Installing PHP-GTK on Linux. If you have not already rea...

I recently needed to develop an HTML form to input and edit contact details in a database with the usual name, address, telephone, and web page fields. This very common task is made more complex because of the need to validate the input data according to various rules and to notify the user if the validation process fails. I m also always keen to separate the presentation logic (typically HTML) from the programming logic (PHP, in this case). // )...

I have read several posts and noticed the large number of questions about Postgres so I decided to start from the beginning on how to get a PostgreSQL Database up and running. I am also going to try to cover some of the most common questions about startup and configuration. I will be making the following assumptions about your system setup: 1) You have Redhat 7.0 installed 2) PostgreSQL is not currently installed 3) You have Gnome installed (I l...

There are a number of great online GIS ( Geographic Information System ) solutions out there, ranging from Mappoint to Mapquest to some cool PHP projects. However, it is still nice to be able to plot your own data and put some basic mapping utilities on your site with a minimum of fuss and bother. Over the next couple of articles I will hopefully be able to give you a few pointers on how to create your own basic GIS system for free. I do not cla...

In my previous article I described a very simple method of plotting longitude and latitude coordinates onto a drawn map of the world. With a very small amount of work modifying the script in the article - adding a FOR loop and some database code ) you could quite easily come up with a system like www.geoURL.com. The main limitation with this system is that you are restricted as to what background you can use. You have to have a predrawn raster i...

In this final part of a three-part series on unit testing, we discuss the use of graphical interfaces, unit testing in a web environment, and more. The article is excerpted from chapter six of the book

SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver graphics, animation and sound to users on the Internet. Flash enables you to provide a very rich and dynamic interface to the user. Almost 90% of web users can view SWF content without having to install a browser based plug-in, and over 200 million people have downloaded the Flash player. Macromedia opened the specifications for SWF in April 1998 and SWF support was added to PHP in PHP 4...

As more and more web sites start incorporating a database in some part of their design, we can start using the data that those databases collect to display statistics. A lot of web sites today have opinion polls or voting applications somewhere. It s one thing to display the data in a table, but quite another to create a graph from the data. Sure, we could slap together a workable bar graph with some tables, but what about line graphs or pie gra...

In October and November, I wrote a two-part tutorial on reading RSS feeds in PHP. Partly motivated by the chance to introduce RSS to PHP coders who hadn t yet gotten an understanding of it, it was also motivated by my frustration in struggling to find an aggregator that did what I wanted it to. This month, I introduce an RSS/Atom aggregator that, so far, does just what I need. It s called Gregarius, which I originally thought was a misspelling o...

Are you searching for an accessible guide on how to create a blog application with PHP 5? Then this set of articles might be what you ve been looking for! Welcome to the second part of the series Building a Blogger with PHP. In three parts, this series demonstrates in a few easy steps how to build a classic blog application in PHP 5 by following an object-oriented approach.

Are you interested in learning the foundations of different structural patterns in PHP 5? If your answer is affirmative, then you should start reading this article immediately! Welcome to the last installment of the series Introducing the Facade Pattern in PHP 5. In two consecutive articles, this series shows you how to create and use facade classes in PHP-based development environments.

Although a site may not always warrant a full multilayer navigation menu, most websites usually have at least a few different sections. Often many pages have links back to the top pages of each section, and therefore it is useful to highlight which section the user is currently in. Listing 9.2.1 looks at the URL of the current web page and, based on that, determines what section of the website it is in and changes the section menu. Listing 9.2.1...

The fascination with having software automate your mundane tasks never ceases. One such tedious activity lies in email parsing. Email accounts can be a useful tool for enabling people to enact a request or issue a command that may not require the intervention of humans. One such example is the, now all to common, unsubscribe request to harmless lists and nefarious spammers. The automated program that handles these requests is called ...

So you ve read about how Object Oriented programming can help you with your big web projects and you ve started it using with PHP? If you ve already written a handful of classes to implement a site and you re methodic, then you should have written some documentation about them. But If you re just messy like me you ve just written some comments within the classes source and no other documentation. Without documentation it s difficult to remember...

We very often need to import data into MySQL databases. This becomes a tough job if we don t have a reliable and easy-to-use MySQL GUI. At times, when I am working on deadlines, this job becomes frustrating and I find myself wishing I had a tool to do this job for me. I recently found Navicat, which can convert Excel spreadsheets and MS Access to MySQL databases, eliminating time-consuming data entry and the errors that may accompany it. The tool...

by kenlin This article discusses a solution to import MS Excel, MS Access, XML data to local or Remote MySQL databases by using a famous MySQL Admin Tool called Navicat. You can find the information of Navicat at http://www.mysqlstudio.com/detail.php3. Overview We very often need to import various data into MySQL databases. This becomes a tough job if we don t have a reliable easy-to-use MySQL GUI; At times, when I am working on deadlines, this...

When I compiled PHP on my LinuxPPC box, I didn t have GD installed and didn t want to add another layer of complexity by compiling it in. GD will let you do all kinds of cool things - creating gifs, complex charts, etc, if you use libraries from the Sample Code Archive here on this site and PHP s built in functionality. I didn t want the lack of GD to stifle me too much, so I started hunting around for a way to generate html-based graphs and cha...

With more and more e-commerce sites popping up around the world, the amount of transaction servers will need to grow to support them all. Many of the newer e-comms providers have made life easier for us developers by developing a web based environment to execute their transactions. Let me explain. What do they do ? While some providers make you install application on your servers to talk to their servers a lot now avoid that situation by doing t...

Don t you hate it when you are at a friend s house or visiting relatives and you want to check your email but dont know your POP/IMAP settings. Or even worse, they dont have your POP or IMAP software? Web based email seems to be the talk of the Net lately. Heres how to use PHP to make a quick, simple and effective IMAP or POP mail reader. Once this is done, you can now be able to read your email from anywhere in the world with only a web browser...

Have you ever wanted to build an intelligent Web application? Paul Meagher shows how to do it using conditional probability. (This intermediate-level article was first published by IBM developerWorks, March 16, 2004, at

PhpAdsNew is one of the most popular open source ad projects on the Internet. We use it right here on devArticles to manage ads for our advertisers, and I would honestly have to say that it s the best ad management system I ve ever used. In this article Mitchell s going to give you a guided tour of PhpAdsNew, including how to install it, how to create your first banner, and also how to create your first banner rotation.One of the great things abo...

While the first article in this series discussed building intelligent Web applications through conditional probability, this Bayesian inference article examines how you can use Bayes methods to solve parameter estimation problems. Relevant concepts are explained in the context of Web survey analysis using PHP and JPGraph. (This intermediate-level article was first published by IBM developerWorks on April 12, 2004 at

Cookies are a great invention, allowing the web developer to maintain the login status of their users. However, problems occur when your site or network has more than one domain. The cookie specification says that any cookie set for one domain, must not be sent to any other domain. Therefore, if you set a cookie in your user s browser on one domain, that cookie will not be available on any other domain. This is a big problem, if you want your us...

In the first part of this series, I covered the basics of MVC programming in PHP and created most of the base classes. In Part 2, I will be covering the controller and the presentation layer. (Parts three and four, Implementing the View in PHP MVC and Implementing MVC in PHP: The Model are also available.) // ); //]] The Controller Quite simply, the controller handles incoming requests. It uses input, in this case from the

This article series (starting with Understanding MVC in PHP and continued in Implementing MVC in PHP: The Controller and Implementing MVC in PHP: The View) demonstrates how to build an MVC web framework using PHP 5. This article explains the Model part of Model-View-Controller design. // ); //]] The Model is where the majority of the application s logic sits. It is where you run queries against the database and perform calculat

This is the third article in a series about understanding MVC in PHP. The first article explained basics of MVC programming in PHP. The second article showed the implementation of the Controller in MVC. The final article is Implementing MVC in PHP: The Model. // ); //]] The presentation layer, as I call it, is the View, in common MVC terms. Its sole responsibility is to display information. It could care less about authenticati