PHP - Joel Lipman .Com

PHP & MySQL Search Engine

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 09 March 2011; Hits: 7313

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:

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$search_term_esc = AddSlashes($search_term);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM Content WHERE content_body LIKE '%$search_term_esc%'";

$search_term_esc = AddSlashes($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;

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 328

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 22 October 2010; Hits: 11560

This is a note to myself but also to anyone out there who's spent as long as I did looking for a solution to this. Maybe it's just me but this is the scenario:

Joomla works fine with international characters
A Module Extension I wrote for Joomla! displayed funny characters.
The Joomla! articles were displaying the correct characters for that language set.
I needed to make my extension read data from a MySQL database and display the caracters as intended with UTF8.

I tried enough extensions and forum solutions, and although these changes would have an effect on the module (such as take away accents and convert to ASCII), they weren't what we were looking for.

The quick solution was to make the script run a MySQL command at the start:

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SET NAMES 'utf8'

SET NAMES 'utf8'

Now I need to run this command from within a Joomla! extension using the mysql Joomla! classes, here's how I've used in this script pulling IDs and titles from the a sample table:

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 303

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 30 September 2010; Hits: 4522

Quick tip or note to self: How to get yesterday's date irrespective of date format or daylight savings time.

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$today=date("Y-m-d");
$yesterday = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") , date("d") - 1, date("Y")));

$today=date("Y-m-d");
$yesterday = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") , date("d") - 1, date("Y")));

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 299

Creating a Top 10 chart with less code

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 18 February 2010; Hits: 4936

I've decided to put something in here as it took me an age to find out how I could do it.

This is when using a MySQL query within a PHP script. The process is used often to do a statistics table or top ten chart of your data (eg. movies, music, etc).

My aim is to do the following:

retrieve data from a table,
count the number of times each data exists,
sort it in reverse order so that the most frequent is at the top of the list
print out each row with the number of times that particular data appeared in a row

My old method was to:

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 12 February 2010; Hits: 4201

I'm beginning a list as I've just spent an age trying to get PHP output to create a text file. Then my client showed me how she then opens the text file in Excel, so I said we could get the script to do that instead.

PHP to TXT

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header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

PHP to XLS

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$export_file = "my_name.xls"; 
ob_end_clean(); 
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off'); 
header('Pragma: public'); 
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); 
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none'); 
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;'); 
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");  
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');

$export_file = "my_name.xls";
ob_end_clean();
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off');
header('Pragma: public');
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT');
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none');
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;');
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 240

Converting SQL date in PHP to European date format and vice-versa

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 17 September 2009; Hits: 8019

The Issue

If you've ever made PHP scripts to process data within a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) then this happens a lot. In the following example, our HTML form will allow the user to specify a date (so excludes hours, minutes and seconds). For demonstration purposes, I'm going to be using the European date format so DD/MM/YYYY.

The Solution

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 17 September 2009; Hits: 6571

The Issue

Basically you have a HTML form with an input field type of 'FILE' (ie. <input type="file" name="file_to_upload" />) and want a PHP file to process this. This example applies to a Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) environment.

The Solution
1. The first thing to do is check that your HTML form is setup to do this:

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 06 September 2009; Hits: 5201

I added this article because when I was only trying to look up how to do this, this nut "the Storyteller" went and carried out a benchmark test on the most popular ways of counting the occurrence of a specific word within a string of text.