Web Development

Client and server-side programming. Covers JavaScript, PHP, Perl and ASP.

Book Review: Getting StartED with CSS

28 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

Getting StartED with CSS by David Powers is published by “friends of ED” / Apress. It was first published in late 2009. As the title implies, this is a book for CSS newbies or casual CSS coders who want to deepen their knowledge.

The timing of this book is spot on. Microsoft has finally produced a reasonably CSS-capable browser in the form of IE8, and IE6’s usage is starting to dwindle. Now is a great time to learn CSS 2.1 in depth, and discover what it can really do.

This book thoroughly explains pretty much all the features of CSS 2.1, and also touches on some of the features of the upcoming CSS 3.

Here’s my full review of the book.

Wrapping Text with PHP’s wordwrap() Function

19 January 2010 / 4 Comments

Occasionally your PHP script will need to break up a long line of text into several shorter lines while preserving whole words. This can happen if you’re formatting some text for printing or emailing, or you want to display preformatted text in a Web page using the pre element.

PHP gives you a handy function, wordwrap(), to do this job for you. This tutorial shows you how wordwrap() works.

Adding a WYSIWYG HTML Editor to Your Site

17 December 2009 / 30 Comments

What is a WYSIWYG HTML editor?

A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is a JavaScript-driven Web form field that lets users enter formatted text, much like using a word processor. The editor then converts this formatted text into HTML when the form is sent to the Web server. Here’s what a WYSIWYG HTML editor looks like:

CKEditor screenshot — CKEditor is a popular JavaScript-based WYSIWYG HTML editor

Most WYSIWYG editors let you do at least the following:

Add formatting such as bold, italic, and underlining
Create headings (H1, H2 and so on)
Create links
Use different font faces, sizes, and colours
Insert bulleted and numbered lists
Create tables
Left-align, right-align, centre, and justify text
Embed images, Flash movies, and more
Edit the HTML directly if desired

Many editors take things further, allowing you to upload images, Flash movies and other files to the Web server, and browse files on the server.

Padding PHP Strings with str_pad()

3 December 2009 / 1 Comment

In Trimming PHP Strings you learned how to remove unwanted whitespace characters from around a string. The opposite of trimming is padding — adding extra characters to either end (or both ends) of a string to make the string a certain length.

Padding is handy for lining up strings vertically for display, for adding leading zeroes to numbers, or for any situation where you need a string to be of a certain fixed length.

In this article you’ll explore PHP’s str_pad() function for padding strings.

Trimming PHP Strings

26 November 2009 / 1 Comment

In programming-speak, trimming a string means removing unwanted characters — typically whitespace characters — from either end (or both ends) of the string. This is useful in a number of scenarios, such as:

Cleaning up user input, such as text field values in a submitted form
Removing unwanted line-break characters at the end of a line
Ensuring that a string is in the correct format for passing to another program

In this article you explore 3 useful PHP functions that you can use to trim strings:

trim() for trimming both ends of a string
ltrim() for trimming the beginning of a string, and
rtrim() for trimming the end of a string.

[Read more…] about Trimming PHP Strings

Formatting PHP Strings with printf and sprintf

19 November 2009 / Leave a Comment

Like many other languages, PHP features the versatile printf() and sprintf() functions that you can use to format strings in many different ways. These functions are handy when you need convert data between different formats — either to make it easy for people to read, or for passing to another program.

PHP features many other functions to format strings in specific ways — for example, the date() function is ideal for formatting date strings. However, printf() and sprintf() are great for general-purpose formatting.

In this tutorial you look at how to work with printf() and sprintf() to format strings.

Converting PHP Strings between Upper and Lowercase

29 October 2009 / Leave a Comment

One of the nice things about working with strings in PHP is its huge range of built-in string-handling functions. If you want to do something to a string, chances are there’s a PHP function to do it for you!

In this article you’ll look at PHP’s string functions for converting text between uppercase and lowercase:

strtolower() for converting a string to lowercase
strtoupper() for converting a string to uppercase
lcfirst() for converting the first letter to lowercase
ucfirst() for converting the first letter to uppercase
ucwords() for converting each word to uppercase

Top 10 Firefox Add-ons for Webmasters

28 October 2009 / 4 Comments

Firefox is a pretty nice browser in its own right, but one of the things that makes it so useful is the huge range of add-ons available. You can use add-ons to customize the way Firefox behaves, or to add new features to the browser.

There are hundreds of add-ons that can help you as a Web designer or developer — there’s a full list on the Mozilla website. In this article I’ve attempted to distil the list down to the 10 add-ons that I find most useful as a webmaster. I’ve ranked them in approximate order of importance — the ones near the top of the list are the ones I use most often.

Enjoy — and if you have any suggestions please post a response below!

Replacing Text in PHP Strings

19 October 2009 / 1 Comment

As well as searching strings in PHP, often it’s useful to replace text within strings too. For example, it can be handy for manipulating strings containing data, or when formatting text for displaying in a Web page.

PHP gives you a couple of useful functions for replacing text in a string:

str_replace() searches for one string of text and replaces it with another.
substr_replace() replaces text at a specified position within a string.

Read on to discover how to use these 2 useful PHP functions.

Searching Strings in PHP

13 October 2009 / 6 Comments

When writing PHP scripts, you often need to search a string for a particular chunk of text. For example, you might be writing a search engine to search through pages of content, or you might want to know if a URL or email address contains a certain domain name.

PHP gives you many useful functions for searching strings. In this article you look at:

strstr() for finding out whether some text is in a string
strpos() and strrpos() for finding the position of some text in a string
substr_count() for finding out how many times some text appears in a string

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