Snippets

Create a URL slug from any string

Mon, 14/12/2009 - 19:28 — horuskol

Okay, so automically generating a friendly URL for a blog post or forum post from their titles doesn't really take a lot - but this snippet might make it easier for you:

function make_slug($orig, $length = 0)
{
  $slug = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/', '-', $orig);
  $slug = preg_replace('/\-\-+/', '-', $slug);
  $slug = strtolower($slug);
 
  if ($length > 0) {
    // limits the length of the slug
    $slug = substr($slug, 0, $length);
  }
 
  if (strrpos($slug, '-') == strlen($slug) - 1) {
    // removes any ending -
    $slug = substr($slug, -1);
  }

Snippet: function round_e()

Tue, 06/10/2009 - 19:53 — horuskol

I recently helped a poster at HTML Forums who wanted to be able to reformat floating point numbers in PHP.

The problem is that some of these numbers were in exponential format. There was also a requirement not to round a number like 0.004 to 0, although the 'precision' was to be constant for all uses of this function in the script.

8.8458e-119    = 8.84e-119
1.06542e-52    = 1.07e-52
2.68e-36       = 2.68e-36
2.91405e-35    = 2.92e-35
0.0190644      = 0.01
0.0205511      = 0.02
0.004          = 0.004

Snippet: function intToRoman()

Sun, 06/09/2009 - 14:13 — horuskol

A fun little function that will produce the Roman Numeral representation for any number from 1-3999.

The reason for the limitation is because the Romans used barred letters for the number 5000 and larger, and the representation of 4000 would be MV, which is hard to represent in a simple ASCII string (maybe as an exercise to the reader, the function can be extended?).

function intToRoman($number)
{
    if (!is_numeric($number)) {
        echo "Input is not a number\r\n\r\n";
        return;
    }

Snippet: Generate a Time-Based Key

Sun, 26/07/2009 - 19:00 — horuskol

I recently helped another developer looking for a way to only allow access to one site from an iframe on another. Ideally, this would be done with the HTTP_REFERRER header, but this isn't always set by the browser, and so would prevent too many people from seeing the content properly.

My solution was simply to use a time-based key that could be generated on the site containing the iframe and tested on the remote server before allowing access to the content.

Snippet: function astrstr()

Tue, 25/11/2008 - 23:07 — horuskol

Following up on the astrpos() function, here is an astrstr() function:

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