Excel: convert degrees minutes seconds to decimalhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/microsoft/excel/excel-convert-degrees-minutes-seconds-to-decimal.html

06 November 2014 Note that I tend to copy the coordinates off a website which has strange apostrophes and double-quotes. You can change this but remember to put two double-quotes if you are searching on it, eg: FIND(""",B1) // will NOT work! FIND("""",B1) // will work...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Excel
• Language: en-GB

Submit form as a server and not the client with cURLhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/automation/api-misc/submit-form-as-a-server-and-not-the-client-with-curl.html

20 February 2015 script which accepts the values from a submitted HTML form and sends it to a server on another domain for processing. This applies to Linux Apache MySQL and PHP (LAMP) setups. Why? A customer wanted to connect their Mobile App to a third-party API. The...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: API Miscellaneous
• Language: *

Convert foreign characters to English alphabethttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/database/mysql/convert-foreign-characters-to-english-alphabet.html

13 June 2016 system (CMS) that I'm working on has just gone international and started including the names of places in other countries. This is nice but its search engine doesn't work properly as it thinks "riviere" is different to "rivière". We need to ensure that...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: MySQL
• Language: *

PHP Issue: simplexml_load_string parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !https://www.joellipman.com/articles/web-development/php/php-issue-simplexml-load-string-parser-error-input-is-not-proper-utf-8-indicate-encoding.html

02 August 2016 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()....

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Personal Home Page
• Language: *

Zoho Deluge: Loop through 30 Minute Slotshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-deluge-loop-through-list.html

30 November 2018 This code snippet took me a while to do and the documentation is flaky so I thought I'd make a note here just in case I need to refer to it again. Why? I want to modify a picklist and fill it with options from a certain time of the day to the closing...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho CRM: APIv2 using PHP & cURLhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-crm-apiv2-using-php-curl.html

30 January 2019 This is an article documenting how to access ZohoCRM with API v2 using PHP and cURL. The first few functions are to manage OAuth v2 and generate the refresh and access tokens. The second snippet of code below is using the functions to read data from...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: en-GB

CSS Ordered List 1, 1.1...1.10 Formatting and Alignmenthttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/web-development/css/css-ordered-list-1-1-1-1-10-formatting-and-alignment.html

10 July 2019 to remind me on how create an multi-level ordered list that indents and aligns correctly. Why? I'm finding that I need to do this quite often for some clients who want to include their terms and conditions in quote/invoice templates and want the HTML to...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Cascading Stylesheets
• Language: en-GB

Zoho Creator: Retrieve record with case-insensitive queryhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-creator-retrieve-record-with-case-insensitive.html

21 November 2019 expressions insert statement is terminated Line:(99)" > "Duplicate entry 'MyProduct1' for key 'Product_Name' Line:(99)". This indicates that the search to see if the product exists is case-sensitive, but when trying to insert the product, it is...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

MySQL: Count occurrences of words in a columnhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/database/mysql/mysql-count-occurrences-of-words-in-a-column.html

12 March 2020 This is an article to document how to output the most frequently used words in a MySQL database column. How? Note this only applies to MySQL. So the following query will return a count of each word in your database column by order of most used first...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: MySQL
• Language: *

Windows OS: Alt Codes / Symbols / Special Charactershttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/microsoft/windows-os/windows-os-alt-codes-symbols-special-characters.html

03 June 2021 What? This is a simple article to demonstrate how to type special characters not found on your keyboard or on a Qwerty UK/US keyboard layout. Why? Being able to type international characters from other alphabets is necessary when dealing with languages...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Windows OS
• Language: *

Zoho CRM & Zoho Creator: Query returns some fields missing other data on the recordhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-crm-zoho-creator-query-returns-some-fields-missing-other-data-on-the-record.html

26 July 2021 A super quick article to demonstrate how an idiot like myself can misread the documentation. This particular article shows you how to customize the search results or response from using zoho.creator.getRecordById(). Why? My use case scenario is that I...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

ZohoCRM: zoho.crm.searchRecords only returns certain recordshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zohocrm-search-records-only-returns-certain-records.html

29 July 2021 This is an article to hopefully resolve for you quicker than it took me, why a zoho.crm.searchRecords() returns some of the records but omits others. Why? The use-case was that we were creating a custom related list on a Zoho Finance > Sales Orders...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Deluge: Calculate Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds between two Timestampshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-deluge-calculate-days,-hours,-minutes,-seconds-between-two-timestamps.html

21 September 2021 article to calculate the time between two timestamps and break it down into days, hours, minutes and seconds. Why? I've done this in lots of other systems but here's one in Zoho Deluge. How? We're going to make use of the .toLong() function applied to a...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Deluge: Generate List of TimeZoneshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-deluge-generate-list-of-timezones.html

19 October 2021 and convert to a Zoho Deluge list that will eventually be used to populate a dropdown. Why? Because I find myself doing this quite a bit and wanted a quick way of extracting a SELECT list in someone else's form. How? So, let's copy the HTML select into...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Creator: Copy Subform to other Subformshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-creator-copy-subform-to-other-subforms.html

17 November 2021 shifts from Monday to Saturday. The form I have looks something like the following: and displays as something like this: The code I create a workflow that when the decision box "Copy Monday to the Other Days" is clicked it runs the following deluge...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Books: Get Invoice Payment Terms via APIhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-books-get-invoice-payment-terms-via-api.html

06 July 2023 + v_BooksOrgID type :GET connection:"zbooks" ]; info r_PaymentTerms; } This should yield something as follows: { "code": 0, "message": "success", "data": { "payment_terms": [ { "payment_terms_id": "123456000000000123", "payment_terms": 15, "is_default":...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Creator: Find Duplicates by Customer Name for Large Datasetshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-creator-find-duplicates-by-customer-name-for-large-datasets.html

12 July 2023 there entering one customer at a time. Even a loop would hit a statement execution limit. Why? My use-case is that I need this done over a dataset of 20k+ contact records and that's only half of the production system's contacts. I needed a quick bit of...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Books: System Values Mapshttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-books-system-values-maps.html

07 November 2023 in my site but I'm putting all of them here just for quick reference. How? Note that for the below, I recently updated this article (2024-05-21) due to the API domain name change from https://books.zoho.com to https://www.zohoapis.com/books and changed...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Deluge: Convert Hex to RGBhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-deluge-convert-hex-to-rgb.html

11 October 2024 value (RGB). Why? It's likely that Zoho will avail their color picker at some point as an input but at the time of print, this hasn't happened yet. Here's a function in deluge that takes a 3 or 6 character hexadecimal color and returns the RGB values...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *

Zoho Deluge: Connect to Shopifyhttps://www.joellipman.com/articles/crm/zoho/zoho-deluge-connect-to-shopify.html

15 July 2025 A quick article showing 2 ways of connecting to Shopify's REST API with a custom app. Note that this is not for an app embedded in the Shopify instance but for a third-party app, such as a Zoho Creator app, to connect to the data within Shopify. Why? At...

• Type: Article
• Author: Joel Lipman
• Category: Zoho
• Language: *