Tag Archives: Curly bracket programming languages

PHP Associative Arrays Coding Style

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No PHP programmer writes code without arrays. Sound strange, but as many programmers there are, as many ways to format the array notation there are.

My advice is to rely on a defined standard. I personally use the Zend Framework’s coding style.

So how to format the code? The first way is on the same line:

$myArray = array('key1' => 'value1',
		 'key2' => 'value2');

And the other, perhaps more clear way is to place the associative pairs on a new line:

$myArray = array(
	'key1' => 'value1',
	'key2' => 'value2',
);

Note that in the second example there’s a comma after the second pair. This is correct PHP syntax and is strongly encouraged!

It’s up to you which way to take. However it mainly depends on the case, but please use standards.

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];
 
?>

Modyfing Response Headers with Zend Framework

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Response Headers

You’ve probably seen that you can track the server response headers with Firebug – a wonderful extension to Firefox.

But have you ever asked yourself how to change a response header with Zend Framework.

header()

Typically this is done with the built in PHP function header, where you can setup the header the page must return, but how to make it with Zend Framework?

It’s pretty simple of course, it’s Zend Framework in fact. To be more precise I’ll post a snippet:

$response = $this->getResponse();
$response->setHeader('content-type', 'application/x-javascript; charset=utf-8');
$response->sendResponse();

JavaScript Snippets: IF Statements Optimization

javascript, micro tutorial, , , , , , , ,

A “Typical Installation” …

As most of the desktop software gives us opportunity to choose from typical or custom installations, let me write what’s a typical IF conditional statement in JavaScript and … every other programing language.

if ( thisIsTrue ) {
    printMe("some message");
}

A “Custom Installation” …

The first thing you can improve from the code above is removing the brackets.

if ( thisIsTrue )
    printMe("someMessage");

Because in JavaScript everything’s on the client – every symbol matters. What if we remove as much as we can!

thisIsTrue && printMe("someMessage");

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.