The file function parses a text file into an array, and the file_get_contents function returns a text file as a string.
Reading a file in PHP
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Category Archives: Programming
PHP ini file user_agent configuration option
Today I discovered the user_agent php.ini configuration option. Basically it allows you to specify the user agent PHP uses when it sends HTTP requests for files. I was screen scraping some data from Wikipedia (processing URI schemes) and it was replying with a 403 error, presumably because they’ve banned the default PHP user agent. Anyway I just changed my user agent to a copy of my one from Firefox and things started working. Pretty handy option!
CSS overflow Property
I used the CSS overflow Property today and set it to ‘auto’ so that my code fit on the screen.
pre { overflow: auto; }
CSS :last-child:after
I used the CSS :last-child and :after selectors to hack the content: property on my menu lists. Basically items in the menu have a pipe ‘|’ between them, except no pipe before or after the list. I did that in CSS with:
#menu li:after {
content: ' | ';
}
#menu li:last-child:after {
content: '';
}
How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes
Thanks to this handy document How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes I now my crontab configured so that my jj5-test repo gets updated every five minutes. It’s the sort of thing I generally do in a post-commit hook, but in this case that won’t work owing to the way the servers are configured (the files are in my account and not owned by the www-data user the commit-hook runs as).
So to configure cron I issued the command:
$ crontab -e
And then to update my svn working copy:
# m h dom mon dow command */5 * * * * cd /home/jj5/web/test && svn update > /dev/null
Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS
On my list of things to do is read the document Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS from the W3C. For some reason I can’t quite bring myself to concentrate on it right now.
HTML5 and CSS positioning
I stumbled across a weird bug today that I didn’t know about and wasn’t expecting. I’d done a little bit of a CSS file to go with a little bit of HTML that did some simple positioning of content. Then I validated my document on the W3C Markup Validation Service and it complained about a missing doctype. So I added a doctype for HTML5. After I did that my page looked all screwy, the CSS positioning was applying correctly. Anyway it turned out that the reason the CSS wasn’t applying was because I had property specifications like this:
#content {
margin: 170 50 50 50;
padding: 0;
}
Whereas I needed to specify the units, like this:
#content {
margin: 170px 50px 50px 50px;
padding: 0px;
}
PHP heredoc syntax
Today I used the PHP for the first time.
$data = <<<EOF my data EOF; echo $data;
view-source URI scheme
Today I learned about the view-source URI scheme. Check it out!
URI scheme
Reading about URI schemes today.
The UriSchemes page at the W3C suggests a few ways to add support for URL schemes. Maybe I could get file: URLs doing something suitable for SMB network resources in Firefox.