Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

Foreign Characters create symbols in PHP and MySQL

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 25 January 2016; Hits: 2588

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; Joomla; 23 October 2015; Hits: 2678

What?
This is a quick article to remind me how to move a Joomla administration section and to lock it down to a specific IP address. The below does not involve installing any third-party extensions and will remain in place even if you update your Joomla CMS.

Why?
When checking audit logs, I sometimes see that my administrator url is accessed more than my front-end. The below has worked for me on Joomla websites in general and prevents the administrator URL showing up at all in the stats (unless you were using it).

Leaving this unchecked means that the crackers/hackers will get through ultimately whether it be by brute-force, DoS, Injection, etc. I'm not saying these are silver bullets, but they will slow down some people.

How?
The below will a) change the /administrator location and b) limit access to a single IP address. Note that you will need to ensure you have a static IP (most ISPs now assign static IPs to home broadband users as well as larger corporations). But just in case you don't have one, let me do this in two stages.

: Joel Lipman; Excel; 05 October 2015; Hits: 2897

What I have:
A CSV file exported from Excel along with double-quotes

copy raw

label1,label2
item1a,item2a
item1c,"item2c,c"
item1b,item2b

label1,label2
item1a,item2a
item1c,"item2c,c"
item1b,item2b

What I want:
To read the file (stored on the server) and convert to a JavaScript array of objects

copy raw

var my_object_array = [
     { my_col1_val: 'item1a', my_col2_val: 'item2a' },
     { my_col1_val: 'item1b', my_col2_val: 'item2b' },
     { my_col1_val: 'item1c', my_col2_val: 'item2c,c' }
];

var my_object_array = [
{ my_col1_val: 'item1a', my_col2_val: 'item2a' },
{ my_col1_val: 'item1b', my_col2_val: 'item2b' },
{ my_col1_val: 'item1c', my_col2_val: 'item2c,c' }
];

What I want again:

Read a CSV file already uploaded with JavaScript
Populate a JS array with each row
Account for strings containing double-quotes (and commas to ignore)
Sort the resulting object array

How?

Category: Excel :: Article: 635

: Joel Lipman; JavaScript; 29 September 2015; Hits: 3964

What?
An article on how to quickly adapt an array code and sort by its values. Surprising how many examples are on the web and everyone saying you're doing it wrong... Which is true but quite unhelpful. The original code is not my own either but that's not an excuse. I also found that examples across the web were only partial and thought I'd write a full example here. No jQuery and using the Google Chrome browser. I wanted to:

Sort the array by its values
copyrawstyler
```
my_records.sort();
```
1. my_records.sort();
Iterate through and output these in HTML
copyrawstyler
```
for(i=0;i<my_records.length;i++){
        // do something to my_records[i]
}
```
1. for(i=0;i<my_records.length;i++){
2. // do something to my_records[i]
3. }

Category: JavaScript :: Article: 632

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 24 September 2015; Hits: 2672

What?
A quick article to remind me about this issue. Not sure whether it is specific to the Joomla Content Management System, but within the Joomla! CMS, an error 1054 comes up if you use the above statement.

Why?
The MySQL statement SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT name) FROM table is valid but I get what you mean and it's sometimes difficult to explain why you want to use it.

How?
Method #1: Add an alias to the field:

: Joel Lipman; Windows OS; 23 September 2015; Hits: 2620

What?
A quick article with the code to retrieve your product key in Windows 7 with a small VB script file. There are other articles on the web about this but the ones I found returned errors such as WshShell not valid. This article has a working example applicable to Windows 7 Professional.

Why?
With the Windows 10 operating system offered as a free upgrade (for Windows 7 or later at time of print), I needed the serial number / product key from my Windows 7 Professional 32-bit operating system. I didn't want to dig through my CD/DVDs to find my original windows 7 disc and no longer have access to the email account when I purchased Windows 7 (my university one).

How?
I'm going to use my trusty notepad program, copy the following code to it, and run it:

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 12 September 2015; Hits: 3934

What?
This is an article to document the migration of a Joomla! CMS running version 2.5.11 to an instance of Joomla! CMS version 3.4.1. I would consider the below instructions an ALPHA version as it is considered unstable for official use... Saying that this is how I upgraded my own personal website: www.joellipman.com.

This article assumes you are familiar with upgrading a Joomla! CMS and running MySQL statements against your database.

For the purposes of this article, we will refer to the live/current/production website running Joomla v2.5 as "v25" and the new Joomla instance as "v34". Their respective database tables are prefixed with "v25_" and "v34_". So an example MySQL statement will be:

`v25_db`.`v25_tablename`
-- with the database name and table prefix of database you are READING from (eg. `myuser_joellipmancom_mysitedb`.`lkdjf_content`)

`v34_db`.`v34_tablename`
-- with the database name and table prefix of database you are WRITING to (eg. `myuser_joellipmancom_mysitedb`.`ejf1r_content`)

How?
Here's a brief outline of the whole process:

Backups
Install
Users
Categories -- unstable
Content
Weblinks
3rd-party: JComments

: Joel Lipman; Web-Development; 04 September 2015; Hits: 2267

What?
I needed to use these in a template I was working on. Font awesome is a brilliant tool for webdevelopers who want icons that can be any size of any color without compromising on image quality or overhead maintenance. It's basically a font set that has all the icons you would want in a modern website design.

How?
To use this list, you can either:

Copy the font files to your template folder (my preference) and add the linked stylesheet in the head section of your webpage. I'm selective of what icons I copy over but the full directory can be found at https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome:
copyrawstyler
```
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css">
```
1. <link rel="stylesheet" href="path/to/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css">
OR add the linked stylesheet to the head section of your webpage
copyrawstyler
```
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.4.0/css/font-awesome.min.css">
```
1. <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.4.0/css/font-awesome.min.css">

You then add the icon to your webpage using a CSS reference:

copy raw

<i class="fa fa-facebook-square"></i> My facebook social icon

<i class="fa fa-facebook-square"></i> My facebook social icon

Further examples are on the following site at https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/examples/.

The List
This is a copy of the cheat sheet version 4.4. If some icons don't appear on this page, it is because I have only copied over some of the entire directory (the icons I want to use).

Category: Web-Development :: Article: 610

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 02 September 2015; Hits: 2113

What?
So I'm getting an error like this:

The requested page can't be found.
An error has occurred while processing your request.

You may not be able to visit this page because of:
- an out-of-date bookmark/favourite
- a mistyped address
- a search engine that has an out-of-date listing for this site
- you have no access to this page

If difficulties persist, please contact the System Administrator of this site and report the error below.
404 Component not found.

Just because I'm doing something like this:

How?

: Joel Lipman; API Miscellaneous; 27 April 2015; Hits: 18732

Applies to:

TravelPort Universal API
PHP 4 or 5
cURL

What?
An article on how to resolve errors and setup a standard ping request using the TravelPort Universal API. This is to be achieved using PHP as the server-side programming language and cURL, a sub-component of PHP that allows you to send and receive requests as the server (as opposed to the client device).

Why?
Yes there's documentation online that TravelPort provide you with but it didn't help. The error I'm going to address has to do with getting the latest schemas but as I couldn't find anything using Google regarding these errors or how to set up a basic ping request, I thought I'd write this article.

How?
Using PHP and cURL, here is the full script for a standard ping request. Before you say it doesn't work, it has to be updated every time a new schema is introduced to the system. See my errors section for how you can resolve this.

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 28 March 2015; Hits: 13861

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; Joomla; 13 March 2015; Hits: 9704

What?
A quick article for Joomla CMS version 3.x on resolving a menu item alias conflict:

Warning
Save failed with the following error. Another menu item has the same alias in Root. Root is the top level parent

You will need:

Access to the Joomla Administration Panel (to check for and remove expired menu items)
A good database administrator who is comfortable with making changes to the database

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