PHP - Joel Lipman .Com

PHP - Remove newlines and spaces from StyleSheet

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 03 January 2020; Hits: 3019

What?
This is a quick note on how to reduce a whole bunch of CSS into a single line without unnecessary spaces and new lines.

Why?
What I have:

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#copyright a{
    margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
    box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}

#copyright a{
margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}

What I want:

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#copyright a{margin:10px 0 0 85px;box-shadow:5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51,51,51,0.3);}

#copyright a{margin:10px 0 0 85px;box-shadow:5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51,51,51,0.3);}

How?
So I'm doing this with a regular expression to get rid of newlines:

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$v_AppStyle = "
#copyright a{
    margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
    box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}";
$v_AppStyleFormatted = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $v_AppStyle);

$v_AppStyle = "
#copyright a{
margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}";
$v_AppStyleFormatted = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $v_AppStyle);

and a few str_replace arrays:

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// exceptions
$a_ReplaceFrom1 = array("px ", "0 ", " a");
$a_ReplaceTo1 = array("px?", "0?", "?a");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom1, $a_ReplaceTo1, $v_AppStyleFormatted);

// replace all spaces to empty and replace question marks back to spaces
$a_ReplaceFrom2 = array(" ", "?");
$a_ReplaceTo2 = array("", " ");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom2, $a_ReplaceTo2, $v_AppStyleFormatted);
echo $v_AppStyleFormatted;

// exceptions
$a_ReplaceFrom1 = array("px ", "0 ", " a");
$a_ReplaceTo1 = array("px?", "0?", "?a");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom1, $a_ReplaceTo1, $v_AppStyleFormatted);
// replace all spaces to empty and replace question marks back to spaces
$a_ReplaceFrom2 = array(" ", "?");
$a_ReplaceTo2 = array("", " ");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom2, $a_ReplaceTo2, $v_AppStyleFormatted);
echo $v_AppStyleFormatted;

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 697

Convert Past Date to Time Ago in PHP

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 16 May 2019; Hits: 3707

What?
Just a quick note to refine a function that will take a date in the past and return the number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Why?
Here are some examples of what we want to achieve:

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1 year 2 months 3 weeks 4 days 5 hours 6 minutes 7 seconds  // full string
1 year 3 weeks 5 hours 7 seconds                            // where shown values are not zero

1 year 2 months 3 weeks 4 days 5 hours 6 minutes 7 seconds // full string
1 year 3 weeks 5 hours 7 seconds // where shown values are not zero

Actually we just want the first two words of those strings:

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3 days ago          // where event is 3 days ago or just over but less than 4 days ago
1 week ago          // where event is just over 1 week ago but less than 2 weeks ago

3 days ago // where event is 3 days ago or just over but less than 4 days ago
1 week ago // where event is just over 1 week ago but less than 2 weeks ago

How?

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 679

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 06 May 2019; Hits: 3453

What?
So this is an article for me on how to copy Joomla's and Wordpress' feature where a Title/Name value is converted to a search-engine friendly URL alias and is unique in the database. Ok that's a long sentence; let me try this:

When I save a record in JoomlaCMS or WordpressCMS
It creates a unique name to use in URLs
I want that

Why?
These are used as inputs to server-side scripts for the sake of search-engine friendliness. There are no silver bullets here but I want to block any character that isn't a letter, a number or an underscore.

How?
Suppose the following exists as a MySQL database table called my_table_name:

What we have:

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/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id       | name              | url_alias            |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test        |
|          |                   |                      |
|          |                   |                      |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id | name | url_alias |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1 | My *First* Test | my_first_test |
| | | |
| | | |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

What we want:

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/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id       | name              | url_alias            |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test        |
| 2        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test_1      |
| 3        | My _-_First Test  | my_first_test_2      |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id | name | url_alias |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1 | My *First* Test | my_first_test |
| 2 | My *First* Test | my_first_test_1 |
| 3 | My _-_First Test | my_first_test_2 |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 677

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 02 August 2016; Hits: 7331

What?
A quick article to stop me running into this issue again. This article serves to address the issue of importing characters from an XML in a different language character set and trying to load it in PHP with the function simplexml_load_string(). The error I get is something similar to:

PHP Warning:
simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line #: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xA0 0x3C 0x2F 0x73 in /home/public_html/my_folder/my_xml_processing_script.php on line 160

Why?
I'm downloading an XML feed to our servers, and then loading the downloaded file into memory with simplexml_load_string(). I get the above error when it is attempting to load an XML feed which is mostly in Spanish and breaks at the following XML node:

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<baÃ±os>2</baÃ±os>

-> yields issue: PHP Warning:  simplexml_load_string():     <baÃ±os>2</baÃ±os> in /home/public_html/my_folder/my_xml_processing_script.php on line 160

should read

<baños>2</baños>

<baÃ±os>2</baÃ±os>
-> yields issue: PHP Warning: simplexml_load_string(): <baÃ±os>2</baÃ±os> in /home/public_html/my_folder/my_xml_processing_script.php on line 160
should read
<baños>2</baños>

How?

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 642

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 25 January 2016; Hits: 3343

Applies to:

PHP 5.4
MySQL 5.1.4
Databases initially setup with collation 'latin1_swedish_ci'

What
Another article trying to help people display foreign characters on their website without the funny question marks in diamond symbols and how I solved it in my case.

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 28 March 2015; Hits: 15020

Previously titled
Fix PHP cURL: parser error: Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content

What?
This is an article with notes for me on how to convert some received XML encoded in UTF-16 to some JSON in UTF-8. If it were entirely in UTF-8, I would simply load the received XML with SimpleXML and use the built-in PHP JSON_encode function. I ran into the following errors:

Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [<a href='simplexmlelement.--construct'>simplexmlelement.--construct</a>]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content in /public_html/.../.../my_script.php on line ###

Warning: simplexml_load_string() [<a href='function.simplexml-load-string'>function.simplexml-load-string</a>]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content in /public_html/.../.../my_script.php on line ###

Why?
So I've googled, binged and yahoo'd for this and although there are some solutions that deal with loading UTF16 content into SimpleXMLElement or simplexml_load_string, it doesn't solve my problem. I'm receiving XML data within a cURL result but I get the above error with using either "SimpleXMLElement" or "simplexml_load_string". Returning the XML with cURL isn't a problem, but I want to convert it to JSON and I usually use a PHP function to load the data into an XML array and use the built-in PHP function: "json_encode".

How?

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 27 March 2014; Hits: 4942

What?
A note for myself on some code to convert a string of two names into a string made up of the first name and then using the initial of the second name.

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-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs

-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs
-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

How?

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 556

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 05 September 2013; Hits: 6390

What?
A quick note on a htaccess rewrite rule I'm liking.

What does it do?
What I type:

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http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/videos.html

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/videos.html

Sends this to server:

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http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?myFolder=blog&myFiles=videos

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?myFolder=blog&myFiles=videos

How?

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 520

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 07 February 2013; Hits: 43842

What?
For those of you who use Preg_Replace. Preg_replace is a function that uses regular expressions to search and replace a string.

Why?
Because my understanding with regular expressions is shady and varies from language to language, I've written this article as a quick reference point.

How?

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 03 January 2013; Hits: 13392

What?
Just a quick note on how to format a given filesize and to reduce the display output to a small string, eg:

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196 bytes          : displays as => "196 bytes"
   12945 bytes        : displays as => "12 Kb"
   1478515 bytes      : displays as => "1 Mb"
   8798745455 bytes   : displays as => "8 Gb"

196 bytes : displays as => "196 bytes"
12945 bytes : displays as => "12 Kb"
1478515 bytes : displays as => "1 Mb"
8798745455 bytes : displays as => "8 Gb"

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 468

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 31 January 2012; Hits: 5652

What?
This is intended for activity/session durations and although I usually get MySQL to do the date/time calculations, there are times when we have to do with PHP. This is the shortest way I know to properly convert seconds into total hours, minutes and seconds (taking into account regional settings and without using a date function).

How?

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$total_time =intval(intval($total_seconds)/ 3600).":";
$total_time.=str_pad(intval(($total_seconds/60)%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT).":";
$total_time.=str_pad(intval($total_seconds%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT);

// yields
// 82800  = 23:00:00
// 108000 = 30:00:00

$total_time =intval(intval($total_seconds)/ 3600).":";
$total_time.=str_pad(intval(($total_seconds/60)%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT).":";
$total_time.=str_pad(intval($total_seconds%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT);
// yields
// 82800 = 23:00:00
// 108000 = 30:00:00

On one line:

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$total_time=intval(intval($total_seconds)/ 3600).":".str_pad(intval(($total_seconds/60)%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT).":".str_pad(intval($total_seconds%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT);

$total_time=intval(intval($total_seconds)/ 3600).":".str_pad(intval(($total_seconds/60)%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT).":".str_pad(intval($total_seconds%60),2,"0",STR_PAD_LEFT);

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 413

First and Last Entry on a Page using Modulus Remainder

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 26 September 2011; Hits: 7594

So I know it's quite a long title but I'm not sure what I'll be searching next time. It has taken me a lot longer than I thought it would mostly out of frustration and the inability to know exactly what I'm looking for... always difficult. After a cup of tea the solution was glaringly obvious, just do a primary school mathematics table and it all makes sense (see my 10 mod table below).

This article is a quick note (so I never spend as long again) in PHP on how to determine when looping through a loop, which entry was first and which was last. This is incredibly useful for pagination.