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First and Last Entry on a Page using Modulus Remainder

: Category: Personal Home Page; 26 September 2011; Hits: 8928

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.

: Category: Personal Home Page; 09 March 2011; Hits: 13107

Do you hate sites that do not have a search feature? I do. I think it defeats the purpose of cramming information endlessly in cyberspace.

So we want to give a search engine to our users. This sounds really simple, we could try:

$search_term_esc = AddSlashes($search_term);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM Content WHERE content_body LIKE '%$search_term_esc%'";

Great! Few problems though, multiple terms are not supported; quotation marks and apostrophes may be an issue;

: Category: Personal Home Page; 30 September 2010; Hits: 5281

Quick tip or note to self: How to get yesterday's date irrespective of date format or daylight savings time.

$today=date("Y-m-d");
$yesterday = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") , date("d") - 1, date("Y")));

Outputting PHP files into different file formats

: Category: Personal Home Page; 12 February 2010; Hits: 5930

I'm beginning a list as I've just spent an age trying to get PHP output to create a text file. Then my client showed me how she then opens the text file in Excel, so I said we could get the script to do that instead.

PHP to TXT

header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

PHP to XLS

$export_file = "my_name.xls"; 
ob_end_clean(); 
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off'); 
header('Pragma: public'); 
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); 
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none'); 
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;'); 
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");  
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');