Tag Archives: PHP programming language

Check YouTube Video Existence with Zend_Gdata_YouTube

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The Video Has Been Removed?!

Have you ever seen the famous message on YouTube: “This video has been removed by the user.”, but what if you’re trying to grab that video via the Zend_Gdata_YouTube?

That can happen when you’re reading the feed for a channel or a user’s list of videos. In the feed everything’s OK – once the video is uploaded it appears into the feed. After that the user removes the video and visiting the link from the feed you’ll get the message above.

Actually what happens when you try to read this “video entry” within a Zend Framework’s application. There must be some way to catch this message?

Trying to Catch

The answer is pretty simple! Zend_Gdata_YouTube’s throwing an exception and it can be easily cached. Here’s some source code:

$apiKey = 'your_api_key';
$client = new Zend_Http_Client();
$gdata = new Zend_Gdata_YouTube($client, 'my-app', null, $apiKey);
try {
       $gdata->getVideoEntry($video_id);
} catch(Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) {
       echo $e->getMessage();
}

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.

Debugging in Zend Framework

micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , , , , , ,

Perhaps “debugging” is a bit too strong. However when you’re dumping an array in PHP, you’d probably prefer the print_r or var_dump.

echo '<pre>';
print_r($array);
echo '</pre>';

But did you know that in Zend Framework there’s a built in Zend_Debug?

Zend_Debug::dump($array);

Does pretty much the same thing!

Zend_Date::setOptions and format_type in Zend Framework 1.10.3

micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework, , , , , ,

I recently upgraded from the old Zend Framework 1.9.5 to the latest – 1.10.3. Everything just looked to be working quite fine, except the date formatting. Although I had the same date formatting and options in the old version it seems to be not working.

I had the format_type set to PHP and even though I formatted the dates with a Zend Framework specific format: “d MMM yyyy”.

Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php'));
// ...
$date = new Zend_Date($somedate);
echo $date->get('d MMM yyyy');

Now as it appears format_type php in 1.10.3 is giving completely different result, and the correct format is date() like format in PHP.

Zend_Date::setOptions(array('format_type' => 'php'));
// ...
$date = new Zend_Date($somedate);
echo $date->get('d M yy');

Inline Scripts with Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript

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Once I’ve posted about Zend Framework and script injections into the view of the app. However back than I didn’t mentioned the way the scripts can be injected on whatever place into the markup. This job’s done by Zend_View_Helper_InlineScript and that’s only an abstraction over the HeadScript.

However thus the PHP code goes quite clean and maintainable.

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js');

This is quite interesting because in the case of multiple scripts you can chain them into this:

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

But that’s not everything. Although it looks very pretty and clean, PHP gives you the correct syntax of something like this:

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts
            ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

And that’s particularly good when it comes to fast switching between production and development scripts includes.

$scripts = $this->view->inlineScript();
$scripts
 //        ->appendFile('/scripts/production.js')
            ->appendFile('/scripts/development.js')

You’d ask why I’d to comment my script includes. Because as it appears to be fashionable the JavaScripts are concatenated and compressed. This gives you performance benefits on the client side when downloading and executing the script. So it’s usual to have one compressed/minified and several development scripts. That’s why this commenting strategy is very useful.