Tag Archives: Cross-platform software

PHP: The Array Element Doesn’t Exist – Suppress the Warnings

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What’s the problem?

If you code PHP from couple of hours you are probably familiar with the following problem:

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<?php
 
	error_reporting(E_ALL);
 
	$arr = array();
 
	echo $arr[3];
 
?>

The first and most common solution is just by adding the isset() statement and the code will look like that:

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<?php
 
	error_reporting(E_ALL);
 
	$arr = array();
 
        if (isset($arr[3]))
	        echo $arr[3];
 
?>

However do you know there’s is another simple and elegant solution? Simply add the @ sign to suppress the element existence

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<?php
 
	error_reporting(E_ALL);
 
	$arr = array();
 
	echo @$arr[3];
 
?>

MySQL Expressions in Zend Framework

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If you’re a Zend Framework developer, you’d know the built-in Zend_Db_Table methods insert(), update(), etc.

However the general approach there is like is said:

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// that's very basic example, but in general this is 
// the way it works.

What happens if one of the column have to be an MySQL expression!? In example you’ve a date field and you’d like to insert something like the MySQL’s method NOW().

The solution is simply call a Zend_Db_Expr.

$data = array();
$data['key'] = $value;
$data['date'] = new Zend_Db_Expr('NOW()');
$model = new ModelName();
$model->insert($data);
 
// now the date column will be NOWed :)

Send Mail with Zend Framework

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Simple, but Doesn’t Work!

It may sound strange, because all this is quite well documented in the Zend Framework documentation. Indeed it’s very very simple and all is done only by few lines of code.

$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setFrom('sender@example.com');
$mail->setBodyHtml('some message - it may be html formatted text');
$mail->addTo('recipient@example.com', 'recipient');
$mail->setSubject('subject');
$mail->send();

Even it look simple though, it may not work on your localhost while you’re trying to make it work! Because you’ve to have sendmail setup. And in Zend Framework sendmail is the default transport protocol for sending mails.

What You Have to Do to Make it Work?

Actually you’ve simply to add a transport protocol, just like that:

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.example.com',
                    array('auth' => 'login',
                             'username' => 'username',
                             'password' => 'password'));
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

Where Did I Get These?

Well look at your favorite mail account you probably use every day. It may be hosted in GMail or wherever, but there are some configurations you have to port under Zend’s code and everything will be just fine until you develop the app!

HTML Tag Semantics. STRONG vs. B!

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Do You Use LABEL?

Have you ever mentioned the existence of the LABEL tag? Have you ever used it? I guess the majority of us don’t. Let’s take a look of the following chunk of code:

<label>username:</label> <input type="text" name="username" />

It looks familiar to every web developer, but the most common usage in web forms is:

<div>username:</div>

or

<span>username:</span>

How Looks a LABEL Tag?

In fact if you use LABEL for the form instead of DIV or SPAN you’ll get the exactly same result as layout, beside that most common usage is a DIV or SPAN in place of the forgotten LABEL?! Why is that?

html tags. Label vs Span
Can you see the difference between LABEL and SPAN?

For me the usage of DIV has become critically enormous. It may sound strange that there is a debate about the usage of one or another HTML tag, but don’t you think every little text label in a web project is surrounded by a DIV. Actually that makes clear that if you’d like to be semantically correct, than you should use LABEL.

The funny thing is that almost every project is loading its labels in a PHP array or object or whatever and there they are called “Labels”, but when it comes to HTML they are put into a DIVs.

Why Semantics Matters?

In fact this is important because this is really good for web robots. If this is not important for the human eye it is for a machine “eye”. That’s why there are two tags for bold text.

STRONG vs. B

You can see that most of the browsers display both tags exactly the same by default.

Bold vs Strong HTML tags

Why’s that? Because STRONG is semantically more important than <B>.

So if you want to make a text simply looking bold, wrap it in <B>, but if you want to make it important both for the human eye and for the machines, than use STRONG.

Source: complete demo.

PHP if-else-endif Statements

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PHP: if

A typical web developer knows exactly how a PHP if statement looks like:

   if ( expression ) {
      // if the expression was true proceed here
   } else {
      // there was a false expression
  }

HTML mess with PHP

When it comes to merge PHP and HTML the things are becoming ugly. Indeed most of the template systems as Smarty are improved and developed to overcome this issue, however when working with a native PHP code with no template system or with template system where the PHP code is allowed the things are really bad.

Let me show this in a breve example. Image you have to show different formatted HTML depending on a PHP expression. Something like that

<?php if (expression) { ?>
<div class="message">OK. Your registration is successful</div>
<?php } else { ?>
<div class="error">Something went wrong! Please try again later! </div>
<?php } ?>

Now you can see how difficult to maintain this code is when it doesn’t make use of only one code of HTML markup. Imaging you’ve to print differently formatted tables! Indeed the PHP curly brackets are different to follow.

PHP: the different IF syntax

So there is a PHP syntax that tries to help you manage this. You can write more human readable code like this:

<?php if ( expression ) : ?>
<div>message goes here</div>
<?php endif ?>

Thus you get the ENDIF instead of only one curly bracket. That’s indeed readable enough. In fact you can use this syntax with any conditional or loop statement in PHP:

<?php foreach($array as $key => $val) : ?>
<div class="message"><?php echo $val ?></div><br />
<?php endforeach ?>

To return in the previous example the code above should be transformed in that:

<?php if ( expression ) : ?>
<div class="message">some message here!</div>
<?php else : ?>
<div class="error">some error here!</div>
<?php endif ?>