HIGHLIGHT SPECIFIC WORDS IN A PHRASE
Sometimes, for example,
when displaying search results, it is a great idea to highlight
specific words. This is exactly what the following function can do:
1.function highlight($sString, $aWords) {
2. if (!is_array ($aWords) || empty ($aWords) || !is_string($sString)) {
3. return false;
4. }
5.
6. $sWords = implode ('|', $aWords);
7. return preg_replace ('@\b('.$sWords.')\b@si', '<strong style="background-color:yellow">$1</strong>', $sString);
8.}
GET YOUR AVERAGE FEEDBURNER SUBSCRIBERS
Recently,
Feedburner counts had lots of problems and it’s hard to say that the
provided info is still relevant. This code will grab your subscriber
count from the last 7 days and will return the average.
01.function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
02. $today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
03. $ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
05. $ch = curl_init();
06. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
07. curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
08. $data = curl_exec($ch);
09. curl_close($ch);
10. $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
11. $fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
12.
13. $nb = 0;
14. foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
15. $nb += $circ['circulation'];
16. }
17.
18. return round($nb/$interval);
19.}
AUTOMATIC PASSWORD CREATION
Although
I personally prefer leaving users to choose their password themselves,
a client recently asked me to generate passwords automatically when a
new account is created.
The following function is flexible: You can choose the desired length and strength for the password.
01.function generatePassword($length=9, $strength=0) {
02. $vowels = 'aeuy';
03. $consonants = 'bdghjmnpqrstvz';
04. if ($strength >= 1) {
05. $consonants .= 'BDGHJLMNPQRSTVWXZ';
06. }
07. if ($strength >= 2) {
08. $vowels .= "AEUY";
09. }
10. if ($strength >= 4) {
11. $consonants .= '23456789';
12. }
13. if ($strength >= 8 ) {
14. $vowels .= '@#$%';
15. }
16.
17. $password = '';
18. $alt = time() % 2;
19. for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
20. if ($alt == 1) {
21. $password .= $consonants[(rand() %strlen($consonants))];
22. $alt = 0;
23. } else {
24. $password .= $vowels[(rand() % strlen($vowels))];
25. $alt = 1;
26. }
27. }
28. return $password;
29.}
COMPRESS MULTIPLE CSS FILES
If
you’re using different CSS files on your site, they might take quite
long to load. Using PHP, you can compress them into a single file with
no unnecessary white spaces or comments.
This snippet has been previously discussed on my “
3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP” article.
01.header('Content-type: text/css');
02.ob_start("compress");
03.function compress($buffer) {
04.
05. $buffer = preg_replace('!/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*/!', '', $buffer);
06.
07. $buffer = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n", "\t", ' ', ' ',' '), '', $buffer);
08. return $buffer;
09.}
10.
11.
12.include('master.css');
13.include('typography.css');
14.include('grid.css');
15.include('print.css');
16.include('handheld.css');
17.
18.ob_end_flush();
GET SHORT URLS FOR TWITTER
Are you on
Twitter? If yes, you probably use a url shortener such as bit.ly or TinyUrl to share your favorite blog posts and links on the network.
This snippet take a url as a parameter and will return a short url.
1.function getTinyUrl($url) {
3.}
CALCULATE AGE USING DATE OF BIRTH
Pass
a birth date to this function, and it will return the age of the
person; very useful when building communities or social media sites.
01.function age($date){
02. $year_diff = '';
03. $time = strtotime($date);
04. if(FALSE === $time){
05. return '';
06. }
07.
08. $date = date('Y-m-d', $time);
09. list($year,$month,$day) = explode("-",$date);
10. $year_diff = date("Y") – $year;
11. $month_diff = date("m") – $month;
12. $day_diff = date("d") – $day;
13. if ($day_diff < 0 || $month_diff < 0) $year_diff–;
14.
15. return $year_diff;
16.}
CALCULATE EXECUTION TIME
For
debugging purposes, it is a good thing to be able to calculate the
execution time of a script. This is exactly what this piece of code can
do.
01.
02.$time_start = microtime(true);
03.
04.
05.
06.
07.$time_end = microtime(true);
08.
09.$time = $time_end - $time_start;
10.
11.echo 'Script took '.$time.' seconds to execute';
MAINTENANCE MODE WITH PHP
When
updating your site, it is generally a good thing to temporarily
redirect your users to a “Maintenance” page so they will not see any
critical info such as error messages.
This is generally done using an .htaccess file, but it can be done easily with PHP:
01.function maintenance($mode = FALSE){
02. if($mode){
03. if(basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) !='maintenance.php'){
05. exit;
06. }
07. }else{
08. if(basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) =='maintenance.php'){
10. exit;
11. }
12. }
13.}
PREVENT JS AND CSS FILES FROM BEING CACHED
By
default, external files such as javascript and css are cached by the
browser. If you want to prevent this from caching, simply use this easy
tip:
1.<link href="/stylesheet.css?<?php echo time(); ?>" rel="stylesheet"type="text/css" /&glt;
The result will look like this:
1.<link href="/stylesheet.css?1234567890" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/&glt;
ADD (TH, ST, ND, RD, TH) TO THE END OF A NUMBER
Another useful snippet which will automatically add
st,
nd,
rd or
th after a number.
01.function make_ranked($rank) {
02. $last = substr( $rank, -1 );
03. $seclast = substr( $rank, -2, -1 );
04. if( $last > 3 || $last == 0 ) $ext = 'th';
05. else if( $last == 3 ) $ext = 'rd';
06. else if( $last == 2 ) $ext = 'nd';
07. else $ext = 'st';
08.
09. if( $last == 1 && $seclast == 1) $ext = 'th';
10. if( $last == 2 && $seclast == 1) $ext = 'th';
11. if( $last == 3 && $seclast == 1) $ext = 'th';
12.
13. return $rank.$ext;
14.}
