I’ve meant to work on this for quite a while. These are some of my most used code snippets to shorten a process, handy workarounds, pieces of code I need all the time or other such things.<\/p>\n
HTML: The Meta Redirect<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You need to redirect someone to another page, and don’t want to bother notifying them.<\/p>\n Code: [code][\/code]<\/p>\n Advantages: Silent, works cross-platform, timer can be set (in whole seconds) by adjusting the 0 in content, will work in the body even though it’s a meta tag. PHP\/MySQL: Quickly process and sanitize form data.<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You’ve just accepted a form and want to easily work with the data, and escape the data to prevent SQL injection attacks.<\/p>\n Code: [code]foreach($_POST as $key=>$value) { $$key=addslashes($value); }[\/code]<\/p>\n Advantages: Saves a lot of repetitive entering of $_POST[‘element’]. Instead you just use $element. Also escapes the data early on so we don’t forget further along in the code. PHP\/MySQL: Save an if statement on every mysql_error() check.<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You need to use mysql_error() function to handle errors in your SQL statement.<\/p>\n Old code: [code]$result = mysql_query($query); New code: [code]$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());[\/code]<\/p>\n Advantages: Reduces risk of typos breaking your page, cleaner. PHP\/MySQL: One standardized method of DB querying.<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You want to get in the habit of one naming scheme for your MySQL queries, and don’t want to go the OOP route.<\/p>\n Code: [code]function doQuery($query) { …<\/p>\n $q_descriptivename = “SELECT * FROM table WHERE 1”; Note: No advantage or disadvantage here, I just thought I’d share the way I do my queries. I usually have a functions.php file with things like doQuery, doConnect, and so forth. I then make the file a require_once() in my header.php. There are more efficient ways to do it via object-oriented code, but there are certainly less efficient ways too.<\/p>\n PHP: Regex out non-numerals from a phone number, then put them back for display purposes.<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You have a form input for a phone number, and want to be guaranteed it works in your database. If you’re trying to optimize and want to use a CHAR(10), or just want a unified dataset to work against. Really it’s common sense to have all your data be uniformly stored here.<\/p>\n [code]$phone=preg_replace(“\/[^0-9.]\/”, “”, $phone); \/\/ strip non-numerals …<\/p>\n $disp_phone = preg_replace(“\/^(\\d{3})(\\d{3})(\\d{4})$\/”, “($1) $2-$3”, $phone); \/\/present it in the standard (123) 456-7890 format.[\/code]<\/p>\n Advantages: Regular expressions take a lot of possible entries and catch them all. One-line solutions are always preferable to a switch or some such. CSS: 3-column div-based website with a “sticky footer”<\/strong><\/p>\n Use case: You find tables too outdated and confining, and would rather use divs and CSS.<\/p>\n
\nDisadvantages: Breaks back buttons.<\/p>\n
\nDisadvantages: You create a lot of variables instead of one array. Your array isn’t actually destroyed, just copied. The idea is that the backend is working primarily with this POST data so making a lot of variables isn’t an unwanted thing.<\/p>\n
\nif(!$result) { die(mysql_error()); }[\/code]<\/p>\n
\nDisadvantages: No known disadvantages.<\/p>\n
\n$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
\nreturn $result; }<\/p>\n
\n$descriptivename = doQuery($q_descriptivename);[\/code]<\/p>\n
\n\t\tif (strlen($phone) == 7) { $phone = “505”.$phone; } \/\/ if the user was too lazy to add their area code, add the expected one. Handle this how you like.<\/p>\n
\nDisadvantages: The code above is a very crude handling of too few numbers, but the regex can be tweaked to accommodate that or you can do it via Javascript.<\/p>\n