Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module H109. This topic is presented on public courses Learning to program in PHP, PHP Programming, PHP Programming, Learning to program in PHP

Between accesses to your web pages, data will be stored in data files or in SQL databases. There will also be many applications where initial data is provided in files, or web applications are used to add content to files or make amendments.

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
4483	Moving from mysql to mysqli - simple worked example We have a big codebase of PHP code that uses MySQL databases, much of it written using mysql_ functions which were not object orineted in nature, and have been paralleled by the more recent mysqli_ functions and methods for quite some time now. The older mysql library is now deprecated, with warnings ...	2015-05-03
3424	Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP If you divide £10,000 between 17 lucky children, each gets £588.23 ... but if you divide the number 10,000 by the number 17, you get 588.235294117647. How do you format the data to the appropriate number of decimal places? In Ruby, you can use the % operator on a string - which is an alias ...	2011-09-08
3159	Returning multiple values from a function call in various languages - a comparison I've always thought it a bit odd that you call a function with any number of parameters, and yet it returns a single value; in Java, C or C++ you declare a return type (void if there is not to be anything returned) and you are then constrained by that specification. There are, of course, other ways ...	2011-02-10
3029	PHP data sources - other web servers, large data flows, and the client (browser) As always, I've written a sprinkling of new demonstrations amongst some well-trodden example during the PHP course I'm presenting this week: There's a really short example of how you can call up another server from your own server - [here]. So much more can be made of the web by presenting and combining ...	2010-11-04
2964	An introduction to file handling in programs - buffering, standard in and out, and file handles Stdout and Stderr Programmers typically don't write code to output to the screen / current window, as to to so would be to provide an inflexible system - instead, they output to what's known as "standard out", also known as stdout. Usually stdout defaults to the screen / current window so there's no ...	2010-09-21 (longer)
1780	Server overloading - turns out to be feof in PHP From the manual page on feof: Warning - If passed file pointer is not valid you may get an infinite loop, because EOF fails to return TRUE. From a script on our server: while (1) {   $nlines ++;   $line = fgets($fh,1024);   if (feof($fh)) break; OOps! ... the file that's ...	2008-09-01
1442	Reading a file multiple times - file pointers When you open a file for read, you create a "file pointer" which knows where in the file you are, and each time you read from the file this advances so that you get the next piece of data each time you do a read. Usually you don't see the file pointer at all - it's internal - and you think nothing ...	2007-11-27
1113	File and URL reading in PHP In PHP, we say "there's a function to do that" as the answer to almost any question is going to be in the form of a function name, or a list of functions, to call. And PHP has more functions than almost any other language, making it more flexible than most. Take file handling ... where in so many ...	2007-03-21
1096	Sample script - FTP to get a file from within PHP A worked example from today's course - Only the password has been changed <?php $conn_id = ftp_connect("www.savethetrain.org.uk"); $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, "savethetrain", "melksham"); if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) { echo "FTP connection has failed!"; exit; } else ...	2007-03-01
1094	PHP fread - truncated data Note that PHP's fread function returns the number of bytes you request as the second parameter ...OR the number of remaining bytes if it's less than the number you give ... or 8192 bytes, even if there's more than that available and you've requested more. I got caught out by this one earlier today ... ...	2007-02-28 (short)
997	Most recent file in a directory - PHP Want to report the most recently updated file in a directory in PHP? It's the sort of thing we all want to do, but in a variety of modified forms, quite often ... here's a code snippet to do it for you: $dir = "/home/wellho/public_html/demo"; $pattern = '\.(html|php|php4)$'; $newstamp = 0; $newname ...	2006-12-21
114	Relative or absolute milkman Rather contrary to current trends, we've just started taking regular deliveries of milk (+ bread + eggs) at our training centre from the local milkman. As we grow busier, it's more effective to have someone deliver to us as part of his round rather than having to make a special trip out. And our "mint ...	2006-06-05
709	Handling huge data files in PHP I've handled files up to 2 GBytes in size with PHP ... but there are a number of issues to consider. 1. The size of the PHP "footprint" in memory - when you have a huge data file, you cannot simply read it all in with file or file_get_contents (nor with fread, trying to read the file all at once). Rather, ...	2006-05-04

buslogic.inc	Business logic for quote demo
cloak.php	Cloaking a web site in a PHP wrapper
eurorates.php	Read currency exchanges rates
exchange.html	Automatic exchange rate conversion - collect today's exchange rate from European central Bank
fr2.php	Pulldown menu of files, then search for regex
fread1.php	Read all lines from a data file, report matches
fread2.php	File system and status reports and directory listings
grabtitle.php	Grab the title of a web page (local or remote)
mail_analysis.php	Read and analyse spam report file
mcq.txt	data for Christmas Quiz
quote.htp	HTML template for quote demo
quote.php	Quote demo - top level code
radio.php	look up current radio program in a text file
recent.php	Link to the recently updated file in a directory
savepeople.php	Using PHP to download a data file
saver.php	Write to file - simple diary page
secdo.php	Convert seconds to minutes and seconds
seedoku.php	highlighting a source file
spammiest.php	The 20 spammiest emails in our filter records are ...
timber.php	Reading and extracting from a remote URL
top_pdf.php	Showing top 10 downloads from our site
webhelpers.inc	Web Helpers for quote demo
xmasq.php	Christmas Quiz in PHP

PHP Programming course