What?
A quick article to stop me running into this issue again. This article serves to address the issue of importing characters from an XML in a different language character set and trying to load it in PHP with the function simplexml_load_string(). The error I get is something similar to:

PHP Warning:
simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line #: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xA0 0x3C 0x2F 0x73 in /home/public_html/my_folder/my_xml_processing_script.php on line 160

Why?
I'm downloading an XML feed to our servers, and then loading the downloaded file into memory with simplexml_load_string(). I get the above error when it is attempting to load an XML feed which is mostly in Spanish and breaks at the following XML node:

<baños>2</baños>

-> yields issue: PHP Warning:  simplexml_load_string():     <baños>2</baños> in /home/public_html/my_folder/my_xml_processing_script.php on line 160

should read

<baños>2</baños>

How?

What?
This is a quick note on how to reduce a whole bunch of CSS into a single line without unnecessary spaces and new lines.

Why?
What I have:

#copyright a{
    margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
    box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}

What I want:

#copyright a{margin:10px 0 0 85px;box-shadow:5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51,51,51,0.3);}

How?
So I'm doing this with a regular expression to get rid of newlines:

$v_AppStyle = "
#copyright a{
    margin: 10px 0 0 85px;
    box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 0px rgba(51, 51, 51, 0.3);
}";
$v_AppStyleFormatted = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $v_AppStyle);

and a few str_replace arrays:

// exceptions
$a_ReplaceFrom1 = array("px ", "0 ", " a");
$a_ReplaceTo1 = array("px?", "0?", "?a");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom1, $a_ReplaceTo1, $v_AppStyleFormatted);

// replace all spaces to empty and replace question marks back to spaces
$a_ReplaceFrom2 = array(" ", "?");
$a_ReplaceTo2 = array("", " ");
$v_AppStyleFormatted = str_replace($a_ReplaceFrom2, $a_ReplaceTo2, $v_AppStyleFormatted);
echo $v_AppStyleFormatted;

---

What?
So this is an article for me on how to copy Joomla's and Wordpress' feature where a Title/Name value is converted to a search-engine friendly URL alias and is unique in the database. Ok that's a long sentence; let me try this:

1. When I save a record in JoomlaCMS or WordpressCMS
2. It creates a unique name to use in URLs
3. I want that

Why?
These are used as inputs to server-side scripts for the sake of search-engine friendliness. There are no silver bullets here but I want to block any character that isn't a letter, a number or an underscore.

How?
Suppose the following exists as a MySQL database table called my_table_name:

What we have:

/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id       | name              | url_alias            |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test        |
|          |                   |                      |
|          |                   |                      |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

What we want:

/----------|-------------------|----------------------\
| id       | name              | url_alias            |
|----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| 1        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test        |
| 2        | My *First* Test   | my_first_test_1      |
| 3        | My _-_First Test  | my_first_test_2      |
\----------|-------------------|----------------------/

What?
Just a quick note to refine a function that will take a date in the past and return the number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Why?
Here are some examples of what we want to achieve:

1 year 2 months 3 weeks 4 days 5 hours 6 minutes 7 seconds  // full string
1 year 3 weeks 5 hours 7 seconds                            // where shown values are not zero

Actually we just want the first two words of those strings:

3 days ago          // where event is 3 days ago or just over but less than 4 days ago
1 week ago          // where event is just over 1 week ago but less than 2 weeks ago

How?

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.

What?
A quick note on a htaccess rewrite rule I'm liking.

What does it do?
What I type:

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/videos.html

Sends this to server:

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?myFolder=blog&myFiles=videos

How?

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?

What?
A note for myself on some code to convert a string of two names into a string made up of the first name and then using the initial of the second name.

-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs

-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

How?