Category: Computers & Internet

PHP is an interpreted language; and as such, the computer needs to process the script each time it is run. Honestly, I don’t know much about the internal workings of PHP; so I don’t know how it handles comments in the code. More specifically, I don’t know how well it handles comments.

I have seen sites over the web going back and forth on whether it’s possible to have too many comments. Most I found said that it didn’t really matter; a few said it slowed execution. As I tend to be the type to over comment my code, I decided to test it for myself with some over the top commented code.

One of my web projects, like so many others, has a series of pages where data is displayed in a table. Often this data becomes too large for a single page, and it has to be broken down into separate pages. The 5 dollar word for this is pagination, and you’ve seen it; you just may not have known what it was called. When a page shows links to the next and previous pages and shows you on page x of y, this is what is being done.

Do you ever find yourself needing to shorten a string in PHP? Maybe return the first 25 words of a long story? Give this routine a try. It will return the first n words from a string, or the entire string if it is less than n words long.

Looking at the PHP documentation, it is not clear how to add multiple values for the same case in a switch construct. It seems that you should be able to do

case ("whatever" || "something"):
//Do something;
break;

But, you can’t. I tried, and it didn’t work. Fortunately, after much searching, I found a way to do it; and it’s not near as difficult as I was making it.

It should be pretty easy to get $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, or $_COOKIE variables in PHP code. The problem is that just entering $_GET[‘variable’] causes an error if the variable does not exist. What’s needed is a way to open the variable, and get a blank string if the variable is not defined.