Pure PHP code, part one
Posted on 19/10/2014
It is not a secret that everyone was a beginner and wrote a code of disgusting quality. The skills that allow writing really tidy code come with experience and sometimes one has to admit his omissions in PHP syntax skills. In this article I collect a few simple examples of helpful PHP functions which make you code look much more pleasant.
php -a
Ask yourself have you created a separate PHP file to run a function, which description occupies a line? You can do all this in a console using PHP interactive mode. Of course, this possibility may interest Linux/Mac OS clients and those having virtual server (VPS). Look, what comfort it is to test something small in PHP interactive mode.
array_map()
What is to be done if you need to apply a function to each array element? Can you only do it in foreach loop? But there is a more elegant solution!
php > $values = array('cat', 'dog', 'elephant');
php > print_r(array_map('strtoupper', $values));
Array
(
[0] => CAT
[1] => DOG
[2] => ELEPHANT
)
array_filter()
Imagine you have an array of values where the blank rows or NULL values can appear. What is the quickest way to clear such an array? For example
php > $values = array('cat', 'dog', 'elephant', null, '', 'monkey');
php > print_r(array_filter($values));
Array
(
[0] => cat
[1] => dog
[2] => elephant
[5] => monkey
)
str_pad
Do you remember your feelings when you need to be sure that if you are passed a number less than 10, it needs to have a zero leading format (e.g. 07) . Everything is solved by str_pad()
echo str_pad('0', 2, '4');sprintf()
What if you need to make a row dynamically and its row contains different values? Something like
$str = ‘My first name is ’ . $first_name . ‘ and my last name is ’ . $last_name?Sometime ago I found out such line could be created applying sprintf(). For example,
$str = sprintf(‘My first name is %s and my last name is %s’, $first_name, $last_name);Sizable difference, isn’t it?
chain method
Did you remember your own surprise at PHP classes which allow doing something like:
$driver -> cache() -> file() -> save();The secret is to return $this at the end of each routine. For example
class Cat {
public $hungry = true;
public $happy = true;
public function feed($food)
{
$this -> hungry = empty($food) ? true : false;
return $this;
}
public function hug($qty)
{
$this -> happy = $qty > 5 ? true : false;
return $this;
}
}
$my_cat = new Cat();
$my_cat -> feed(‘fish’) -> hug(4) -> feed(‘water’) -> hug(10);
error_log
Trying to find out one or another variable value, what do you do? Don’t you output this variable into the browser using print_r()? This can be done with the help of error_log() which supplies the variable values to log file and doesn’t show any strange symbols in user’s browser. For example:
error_log(print_r($_POST, true));By the way, it's much easier “to monitor" log file with the help of tail.
tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log