Most Popular Scripts | PHP | Tutorials & Tips

A function is a block of code which can be called from any point in a script after it has been declared. It is basically a compartmentalized PHP script designed to accomplish a single task. Functions are useful because they contribute to rapid, reliable, error-reducing coding, and increase legibility by tiding up complicated code sequences.

Array does not have to be a simple list of keys and values; each array element can contain another array as a value, which in turn can hold other arrays as well. This way, you can create a multi-dimensional array. In this article principles of using multidimensional arrays are explained and source code defining multidimensional array and displaying the array values on the web page is given.

Most scripts written for getting a google pagerank connect to the google servers everytime someone views a page where the script is called. Depending on how busy your site is this can mean that you connect to google thousands of times each day to get exactly the same information. This script uses a cache to prevent this from happening. The first time someone visits your site the script connects to google and then after that the pagerank value is fetched from a cache. This is far faster (my tests suggested about 30 times faster) and requires less bandwidth. Beyond the benefits in time it is also easy to use and can be used to either fetch a value for the pagerank or generate html code to display an image representing the pagerank

BBcode is popular on many discussion boards and allows your users to submit formatted content in an easy to understand way. Correctly processing this content and converting it to html for display on your site can unfortunately be difficult. In this article I demonstrate a simple and straightforward way to process BBCode formatted content using the HTML_BBCodeParser package available from PEAR.

Using freely available php classes I show how it is possible to download the contact list from Gmail and/or the MSN messenger service (given a username and password) and return this to the user. The user can then select or deselect the contacts they wish to send an email to before submitting the form and sending emails to all their chosen contacts. This is quite a nice method to 'turbocharge' the basic 'tell-a-friend' style script. Rather than contacting one friend it is quick and simple to contact fifty or a hundred contacts which means more likely visitors to your site.

This tutorial teaches you how to convert an existing php code to a syntax colored html text.

Arrays can be used in many ways to store and organize data quickly and efficiently. It is one of the more useful data types available to any programming language. This article describes the basics to create and make operations with indexed, associative, and multidimensional arrays.

A collection of 18 tips on managing tables and data rows with PHP scripts. Clear explanations and tutorial exercises are provided on creating and dropping tables; inserting, updating, and deleting rows, selecting and looping through data rows by pages; setting auto-increment IDs.

Sometimes when you write code, you want to perform different actions for different decisions. You can use conditional statements in your code to do this. In this tutorial we will look at two structures: if...else and switch statements.

DSN stands for 'Data Source Name'. It is an easy way to assign useful and easily rememberable names to data sources which may not be limited to databases alone. DSN-less connections don't require creation of system level DSNs for connecting to databases and provide an alternative to DSNs. This tutorial will show you how to connect to an Access database with a DSN and without a DSN.

A collection of 18 FAQs on connecting MySQL server with PHP scritps. Clear explanations and tutorial exercises are provided on MySQL server connection; providing port number, user account and password; selecting or creating database; running SQL statements; checking execution errors.

This routine calculates the distance between two points. It is being used to calculate the distance between two locations using GeoDataSource Products

Returns an array of strings, each of which is a substring of string formed by splitting it on boundaries formed by the string separator. If limit is set, the returned array will contain a maximum of limit elements with the last element containing the rest of string.

This script generates a page akin to a browser's View Source option. The advantage of using this script is that you can customise the stlying to match your website user interface.

This recursive function crawls a domain for Google PageRanks of every webpage on the site.

This tutorial will teach how you to grab the Google PageRanks of every webpage on your domain.

A collection of 8 tutorials on working with directories and files: How To Create a Directory? How To Remove an Empty Directory? How To Remove a File? How To Copy a File? How To Dump the Contents of a Directory into an Array? How To Read a Directory One Entry at a Time? How To Get the Directory Name out of a File Path Name? How To Break a File Path Name into Parts?

If you are the root user then it will display all the databases on the server, but if your not the root user then it will show all the databases that your user has permissions for. It's a really fun to play around with and can be expanded in a variety of ways. It's explained in the comments.

A collection of 19 tips on manipulating PHP strings. Clear answers are provided with tutorial exercises on string functions including strlen, trim, substr, chop, strpos, strcmp, split, etc

A collection of 11 tips on PHP array introduction. Clear answers are provided with tutorial exercises on declaring and creating arrays, assigning and retrieving array elements, identifying elements by keys and indexes, copying arrays: What Is an Array in PHP? How To Create an Array? How To Test If a Variable Is an Array? How To Retrieve Values out of an Array? What Types of Data Can Be Used as Array Keys? How Values in Arrays Are Indexed? Can You Add Values to an Array without a Key? Can You Copy an Array? How to Loop through an Array? How the Values Are Ordered in an Array? How To Copy Array Values to a List of Variables?