Category Archives: PHP

As with anything new on iOS, getting push notifications working has been a pain. Thankfully, there’s a brilliant write-up of the process here: Apple Push Notification Services in iOS 6 Tutorial: Part 1/2. Plus the PhoneGap/Cordova plug-in to make it … Continue reading →

For some reason, Zend have decided not to make PHP throw an exception when you try and load invalid XML into a DomDocument object. This includes XML with invalid characters e.g. &. This means wrapping a try/catch around anything does … Continue reading →

Things I hate about PHP No. 512 (notwithstanding the fact that in comparison to many other things I like PHP): Inconsistency in parameter ordering Say I want to find a small thing in a big thing, like a piece of … Continue reading →

PHP 4 doesn’t seem to create references for objects in foreach loops. e.g. the following will not change the original objects: foreach($placeholder as $contentBlock) { $contentBlock->setPosition(1); } The value of the position property in the original object will remain unaffected. … Continue reading →

After working with PHP 5 for quite some time now, I’ve had to go back to PHP 4 to develop a CMS for a client’s site where we don’t have much over the hosting environment. Going back to the old … Continue reading →

PHP 5 doesn’t seem to attempt to implement any kind of inheritance for properties within static classes. This can be mean having to duplicate code within static subclasses. As an example, we would like to have a parent class (this … Continue reading →

importNode is one of the DOM functions in PHP 5 that I struggled with for a while. What I wanted to do was to take an XML node from one document and insert it into another, and somehow that wasn’t … Continue reading →

The documentation for PHP 5’s DOM functions isn’t at its most helpful yet, so I thought an example of how to use ‘removeChild’ wouldn’t go amiss. Assuming first that you have some DOMDocument XML in a variable called $xml, that … Continue reading →

This benchmark of different ways of looping over a hash array is very interesting. Some things aren’t too surprising, such as counting the elements in an array before looping over them is faster than not counting them, could be expected, … Continue reading →

Working with PHP 5 I thought the ‘magic’ method __toString would be a really great way of substituting objects for simple data types. That seemed the whole point of good object oriented design, so I could change the way a … Continue reading →