Monday, 9 April 2007

Know About PHP Month of Functions

Nexen.net has started the month of PHP functions to introduce PHP developers to a new function every day. The web site states its main aim is to introduce functions that get little usage and spotlight. It says there are over 3000 functions in PHP and they solve different problems. The web site points out a flaw on the developer’s side that sometimes tends to duplicate an existing function.

The web site gives some added information that the team is going to present one or several function everyday. It says, you don’t have to search for it as most of the time; it will be available in the PHP installation, in PHP 5. These functions are also available in PHP4 and are documented, translated and stable.

The web site lists the following functions:

• Export PHP variables: most of the time, PHP applications use a configuration file. With PHP, there are several option to handle them.
• Listing folders: it happens that one have to list files and folders in a specific folder, and this is exactly the goal of scandir. This function works on the local file system of the server.
• Validating dates: validating a date is a common task, especially on the web, through forms.
• Localization: there are times in a Web application where you need to localize some information, such as dates, financial sums and other data. This function is used for the purpose.
• HTTP headers: it contains information for both the server and the brower.
• SQL statistics: with SQL, there are a number of convenient ways to extract stats or to get distinct values from a table's column.
• A different sort: with SQL, there is a convenient clause to sort data and data andwith PHP, there is a load of them. There is the *sort family. Those functions spot an array.
• Counting words: it says, counting word is easy. One just has to slice a string using space character but must ignore dash, and some time quote.