Web Developer in Boulder CO The Blog

Backing up and restoring S3 from a versioned bucket

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 29th, 2015

Here is a set of scripts used to manage backups. You can back up a bucket to another and then restore the source bucket to a certain snap shot in time as well as a few other things. Example: //to run back up (see script at the bottom) prompt> bkupToBu...

Load a class with Zend_Loader_Autoloader by name | without namespaces or prefixes

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 29th, 2014

The web is filled with examples of using Zend Autoloading using the fancy namespace and prefix features of the Zend_Loader_Autoloader, but what if all you want to do is auto load a class based on its name corresponding to a file name? //For example wh...

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Installing xdebug in XAMPP 5.5.19 on Mac OSX

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 29th, 2014

This was tested on OSX Lion. Please let me know if it works on Mountain Lion or later. Here is what we will be doing in a nut shell. You will need to download the correct source code for your version of xdebug and then you will need to use the correct...

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Parsing unevenly spaced columns from text in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on August 23rd, 2014

If you want to parse unevenly or jaggedly spaced columns out of a text file in PHP, below are two functions that will help you do it. Let's say that you have the following text output: col1 col2 col3 ==== ==== ==== ...

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Don't insert when maximum is reached

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on May 9th, 2014

How to control if a record is inserted based on a condition? Don't insert a record if certain conditions are not met. There is a way of using pure MySQL to stop inserting records when a certain number of them has been reached. Let us say that you have...

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Title case function in PHP based on grammatical rules for capitalizing the words in a title

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2014

Creating a Title Case Function with PHP Based on Grammatical Rules. The common way that programmers implement title case is the most simple way, they capitalize the first letter of every word. But what about titles like the title above where the "on" a...

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Installing xdebug in XAMPP 1.8.3 on Linux

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2014

If you have installed XAMPP 1.8.3-0 for Linux and you want to install x-debug here is how to do it using PECL. 1.) Check to make sure /bin is in your path echo $PATH; if :/bin: is in the path then bin is in your path. This makes sure that when you c...

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Overload an array in PHP | Overload a multidimentional array in PHP | On set array call a function in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

If you wanted to overload an array so that you can put your own logic inside of the get and set actions for an array using the syntax $array['property'] try starting with the class bellow and build off it. Example: //create array $obj = new CustomArra...

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Compare the contents of a remote directory with a local directory

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 8th, 2014

Here is a little PHP script I wrote, that you can run from the command line. I wrote it to allow you to see what files are in a remote folder that are not in a local folder. user@localhost the_directory> php compare.php the_host_address.com:/the/remot...

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Using Table Names With Spaces in PHP and mySQL

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on January 2nd, 2014

The key to writing SQL queries using table names that contain spaces is to make sure you use the correct quotes.This is wrong:SELECT * FROM tablename ORDER BY ''field name'' ASCThis is correct:SELECT * FROM tablename ORDER BY `field name` ASCThese (`) ...

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Unix style options and flags with command line PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 24th, 2013

Looking for a more intelligent way to parse in options from the command line into your PHP script other than $argv? For example, you may want to be able to place options in any order like the following: php somescript.php -pv -o value or php somescr...

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Parse a date by a specific date format in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on November 22nd, 2013

In the name of code readability and functionality, if you want to parse a date of a certain format you should do it in a way so that other programmers that look at your code can tell what you were doing. Here is a way as of PHP >= 5.3.0 to parse a st...

programming php

Change Apache/XAMPP user that runs PHP | Fix PHP exec permission issues

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on June 11th, 2013

When you install XAMPP the user name is set to 'nobody' by default in the Apache configuration (httpd.conf). If you are are suffering from permissions issues in PHP then the problem might by the ownership of the files by Linux and the user under which ...

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Strange error in PHP | number zero (0) evaluates to true against a string in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 27th, 2013

Reproducing the error (see solution below): Take a look at this weird error below: $int_zero="reset";$str_zero="0";$int_zero=intval($str_zero);if ($int_zero == "reset"){ echo "equals reset\n"; } else { echo "equals something else\n"; } echo $int_zero...

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Increment date by one day | < PHP 5.2

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 6th, 2013

If you want to increment a date by one day you need to do it using the PHP DateTime function so that you can account for leap years. date_default_timezone_set('UTC'); $time_stamp = strtotime('0000-00-00 00:00:00'); $date = new DateTime(); $date->setTi...

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Generate a list of dates between two dates in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 6th, 2013

If you want to create a list of dates between two different Unix time stamps, here is how to do it: //2001-09-09T01:46:4 $starting_unix_timestamp = 1000000000; //now $ending_unix_timestamp = time(); date_default_timezone_set('America/Denver'); $star...

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Interpret PHP as you type | PHP prompt

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on January 18th, 2013

How to Code PHP from the prompt. How to run PHP in interactive mode. Open a command line prompt and type the following: C:\> php -a Interactive shell php > echo 5+8; 13 ctrl-D to exit If it can't find PHP, you need to check and see if it is inst...

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