Tequila Fish

I’ve been customizing a Wordpress install and have been needing to capture the output of the bloginfo() function, which simply echo’s a string. I wanted to capture the echo into a variable without actually echo’ing the string. You can do so by leveraging PHP’s output buffering functions. Here’s how you do it:

$myStr will now contain ‘Hello World’ without actually outputting it to the screen.

Reference:

• ob_start()
• ob_get_contents()
• ob_end_clean()

For some reason, FCKEditor automatically wraps any content entered into the textbox with a <p> tag. This can cause for some problems in your layout when you’re actually displaying the content. Instead of trying to fix this in your layout with CSS, there is a quick and easy way to turn the auto-wrap off in FCKEditor: Change the FCKConfig.EnterMode setting from ‘p’ to ‘br’. There are a few ways to handle this:

• Edit fckconfig.js:
  Change FCKConfig.EnterMode = ‘p’ ; to FCKConfig.EnterMode = ‘br’ ;
• Change the setting programatically when you instantiate the object, like so (in PHP):
  <?php
  include_once(‘fckeditor/fckeditor.php’);
  $oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor(‘description’);
  $oFCKeditor->BasePath = ‘/fckeditor/’;
  $oFCKeditor->Value = ’some text’;
  $oFCKeditor->Config['EnterMode'] = ‘br’; // turn off auto <p> tags wrapping content
  $oFCKeditor->Create();
  ?>

I prefer the latter way because you can do it on a page by page basis, and there’s no messing with FCK’s core JavaScript files.

I received the following in my Apache error_log when attempting to load the ionCube loader in my php.ini file:

This is because ionCube must be loaded before any of the Zend extensions are. So if you have the Zend extension/optimizer loaded, your php.ini should look like this to get ionCube to work:

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Now playing: Tommy McCook & The Aggrovators – A Loving Melody
via FoxyTunes

I ran into trouble when trying to pass a urlencode()‘ed plus sign into a web address being processed by mod_rewrite.

This $url variable gets echo()’d as a link in a page, so once it’s clicked and loaded in the browser, I then needed mod_rewrite to translate that to the actual URL, which is:

Here is the RewriteRule I was using to match:

This rule should match http://www.server.com/browsealpha/name%2Bhas%2Bplus%2Bin%2Bit/ but for some reason it wouldn’t work. After hours of frustration, I found a few threads mentioning the need to urlencode the string twice, like so:

IT WORKS!!! Apparently this is because mod_rewrite automatically decodes the urlencoded URL, so if you pass in %2B, PHP sees it as %2B0. If you double encode, mod_rewrite decodes the first one, and PHP receives the second one (which is now %2B, which is what we want).

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Now playing: Autechre – 444
via FoxyTunes

If you’re trying to write some text using PHP/GD & the imagettftext function, you will of course need some TrueType fonts to work with. I’ve found a great set of fonts available for free: Webcore. Webcore contains all the fonts webdesigners constantly use, things like Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, etc..

To install, simply download to your server and install the RPM (Fedora):

These fonts will now be available to you in /usr/share/fonts/webcore/.

Make sure you specify the full path when calling imagettftext(), eg:

Your mileage may vary if you are using a different distribution, but the docs state that this RPM should work on other distros.

I’ve come across a little inconsistency between browsers and the way they handle cookies. Using the examples from PHP’s online manual, I was unable to get Safari to remove cookies using setcookie(). All other browsers would clear the cookie with no problems. It turns out that Safari will only delete cookies if both the cookie name AND the cookie path match.

In other words, this won’t work:

But this will work:

Basically, if you set a cookie using a path, you must also specify the path when deleting the cookie. Safari won’t remove the cookie otherwise. This is probably a good thing.

We have an account with a VERY large inbox (over 80,000 emails), and when logging into Squirrelmail the main pane would not load. Instead we’d be prompted by the browser to download a right_main.php file. Accounts with smaller inboxes would load fine, so I figured it had something to do with system resources. This is an easy fix. Open up your php.ini file, and increase the memory_limit value to something larger than the default 8M. Restart Apache and try opening your big-ass inbox again. If it still doesn’t work, increase memory_limit again. Repeat until your inbox will load, but be careful if you have little RAM. I was able to load my 80,000+ inbox by setting memory_limit = 32M.