PHPDeveloper.org

Dokeos Blog: mbstring vs iconv

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:18:08 -0500

In this post on the Dokeos blog, there's a comparison of the mbstring function and the iconv library as it pertains to their use on multi-byte strings.

I was wondering today why use mbstring rather than iconv in Dokeos, and honestly I didn't remember exactly why I had chosen mbstring in the past, but finding information about the *differences* between the two. [...] Searching a bit more, I found a PPT presentation from Carlos Hoyos on Google.

Essentially, it boils down to how the library is integrated - mbstring is bundled and iconv is pulled from an external source. So, if you're looking for maximum portability, he recommends mbstring.

Hasin Hayder's Blog: Unexpected return value from Facebook FQL.query via PHP REST Lib

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:06:00 -0600

Hasin Hayder had been working with the Facebook API and stumbled across a bug in an application they had created for the social networking site:

The method which we used to count number of friends of a specific user who has added that application was returning 1 when there is no friend actually installed it.

He gives the SQL query and the PHP code he was originally using to find out the number of users for the application. The problem came from the fact that the returning value wasn't an array - it was a string. The corrected code (that checks for array-ness) is also included.

PHPWACT.org: Handling UTF-8 with PHP

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:51:00 -0600

Ed Finkler has pointed out a handy resource for those trying to cope with using the UTF-8 support included in several of PHP's functions - this page on the Web Application Component Toolkit wiki.

This page is intended as a reference for functionality PHP provides which can either help with handling UTF-8 or should be regarded as a risk when used in conjunction with UTF-8 encoded strings. Further information can be found on the Internationalization (I18N) and Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues pages.

It talks about the "dangerous" functionality PHP has (issues that the language has in current functions) when using things like the PCRE extension, the string extension, the array methods, handling variables, the XML extensions (DOM and SAX), image manipulation, and URL parsing functionality.

Hasin Hayder's Blog: Counting occurrence of a word in a String - Benchmarking of PHP functions

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:42:00 -0500

In an effort to add to the ever-growing list of "keeping it simple" benchmarks out there, Hasin Hayder presents his own results for the task of fining the number of times a word occurs in a given string.

Today I was just thinking what are the possible ways to count the occurrence of a specific word inside a string. I found some possible ways finally and I just benchmarked them. Wanna see the result?? - for sure you will find it interesting too.

Methods range from a simple split() and count() call out to using the regular expression functions to locate the matches. After running it four times (to check for accuracy), he the stats were pretty much the same. It looks like the substr+count method was the fastest overall with last place falling to the array function method.