PHP

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.

I might already have something similar to this but this deserves its own article. Why? Well try to search the web for a PHP/MySQL solution which suggests on how to count the hours between two times on the same date, when one of the hours is on the other side of the midnight hour...

Now bear in mind the below is in European date format

Consider the following:

Date       Customer        Time From       Time To          Hours
---------- --------------- --------------- ---------------- --------------
04/03/2011 Tweedle Dee     10:00           12:00            2.00
08/03/2011 Tweedle Dum     23:30           00:30            -23.00            

Note the last row is obviously incorrect. This is because the script is not changing the date at the stroke of midnight. Take the last row as an example, the equation that's happening is:

$thisDateSQL=date("Y-m-d", strtotime($sub_row['DateSession']));

$this_time_from1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeFromSession']));
$this_time_to1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeToSession']));

$this_time_from_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_from1.":00";
$this_time_to_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_to1.":00";

$sum_hours = number_format(((strtotime($this_time_from_sql)-strtotime($this_time_from_sql))/60)/60, 2);

// Using the examples above this is doing the following:
2011-03-04 12:00:00 - 2011-03-04 10:00:00 = 2.00
2011-03-08 00:30:00 - 2011-03-08 23:30:00 = -23.00

This is great for everything during that date as long as the "To Date" never goes past midnight into the next day... But what system doesn't do this (no Microsoft jokes please)?

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;

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")));