PHP

Explore PHP, one of the most popular Web programming languages in use today. Learn how PHP works and how to write useful PHP scripts and applications.

Creating Arrays in PHP

10 March 2010 / 3 Comments

Like most programming languages, PHP lets you create arrays. An array is a special type of variable that can hold many values at once, all accessible via a single variable name. Arrays are very useful whenever you need to work with large amounts of data — such as records from a database — or group related data together.

In this article, you’ll:

Learn how PHP arrays work, and why they’re useful
Look at the difference between indexed arrays and associative arrays, and
Learn how to create arrays within your PHP scripts.

Create Nice-Looking PDFs with PHP and FPDF

26 February 2010 / 33 Comments

The PDF format can be a handy way to distribute documents to your visitors. A PDF document is self-contained, looks the same on any PDF reader, and is easy to print. PDFs are often used for reports, brochures, manuals, invoices, product data sheets, and lots more.

Often it’s useful to be able to create PDF documents dynamically from within a PHP script. For example, you can produce a custom PDF report based on a user’s preferences and include up-to-the-minute data.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the process of creating a nice-looking, 2-page PDF document using PHP. You’ll use the freely-available FPDF library to handle the nitty-gritty of PDF creation.

Formatting Numbers with PHP’s number_format() Function

29 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

When displaying a number in a Web page, it’s nice to format the number in an easy-to-read way. For example, 123,456.78 is nicer to read than 123456.784321.

PHP’s number_format() function gives you an easy way to format numbers for displaying to the user. You can separate thousands with commas or other separators, choose the decimal point character, and choose the number of decimal places to display (or display no decimals at all).

Wrapping Text with PHP’s wordwrap() Function

19 January 2010 / 5 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.

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

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 / 7 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

PHP

Footer

Contact Matt

Follow Matt