Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

This is really handy for those of us who have the same code handling multiple sites or multiple sub-domains. A case in point: When I coded NetBoardz (my free forum hosting service now defunct), I had one codebase handling all 250 forums. How? Simple. When the code runs, it determines which site the user is loading and does different things (like using different databases) dynamically.

He shows the two key points to dividing things up - grabbing the domain and subdomain they were trying to access. This can be fed into a script that can switch things like layout or even functionality based on which site they've chosen.

I've noticed that Richard Heyes, who professes himself to be a php guru, deleted my comment on his "Some common regular expressions" posting which simply pointed out his expressions didn't quite do the job and suggested a few PEAR packages that should be used instead of the expressions that he proffered

His examples have the benefit of what he calls "defense in depth" - the functionality to catch a bit more than just a regular expression can alone. His examples include PEAR_Validate for email addresses, Net_CheckIP2 for IP addresses and the Validate_UK package for the sort code and telephone numbers.

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Also included are the evolution statistics comparing PHP to two other languages - ASP amd Masque. Interestingly enough, the growth pattern almost directly matches the inverse of the ASP results.