However is there a way to “upload” files without using a web form, but only by telling the PHP script where to find the image. First and most important the image should be web visible and accessible by HTTP.

The solution is quite easy – you can grab the file using file_get_contents, and than put it on the desired server folder with file_put_contents. Here’s some source:

$image = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/image.jpg');
file_put_contents('/var/www/my.jpg', $image);

Extending the Case

You can go even further by downloading any kind of files with the same approach. What will be the case for an mp4 video is shown in the next example:

$video = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/video.mp4');
file_put_contents('/var/www/my.mp4', $video);

Usage

This can be quite useful when trying to automate an remote upload process. In this case when somebody uploads an image on his site, you can duplicate this file on your server! However don’t forget the copyrights!

What’s the Goal?

You’ve a simple HTML form with several groups of form elements. Imagine the situation with title and link groups. You can have 1, 2 or more title/link pairs which you’d like to save in a database table, where perhaps there are only three columns – id, title, link.

What is the Shortest Path to the Solution?

In fact the task can be done by many ways, but there’s one really elegant solution. As it appears in many occasions PHP and HTML are born to work together!

1. First Step

Create your web form by simply modifying a bit the element names. Usually when you have an input you simply name it after the database column or something similar.

In reality PHP and HTML allows the name to be an array element, just like so:

2. Second Step

Than all this comes in the _POST array in PHP, but formatted in an array manner, so you can simply foreach it!

That is simply enough!

In very very breve these are methods which can validate some data, usually user input, against some specific rules. Imagine there’s a web form that is always checked for empty fields or some fields that may contain valid e-mail addresses. This is so common that became everyday routine to almost all of us. However smart developers make abstractions that help them reuse all this functionality. Even smarter developers make use of frameworks. And for those of you, using Zend Framework, there’s no need to write most of the common used validators, simply because they come with the framework itself.

Technically you’ve various validators in zend, such as Zend_Validate_Alnum, Zend_Validate_Email or Zend_Validate_Regex. All these are extremely useful when it comes to automatic, bullet proof validation, but I’m going to talk more about one specific validator.

Zend_Validate_Db_RecordExists

Although the implementation is nothing more than just a chunk of code and doesn’t pretend to be difficult, the idea of such validator is genius indeed. It really helps you do some amazing job.

Image you have to check some database record existence. Then comes in help this validator. In fact I’m pretty sure almost everyone has experience with such kind of task. Simply because the registration process almost always requires it. When you try to register new user you more often check for the username existence. Although you may solve the problem with other technique by catching the exception the database is throwing for duplicate entries, this should be assumed just as an example.

I’m pretty sure this validator can be really useful in many occasions!