The PHP group has made a two quick updates to the recent release of PHP 5.2.6 for the Windows users out there:

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).

On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

Hasin Hayder has a new post to his blog today about trying to set up the PHP extension for interaction between his scripts and the subversion version control libraries on his Ubuntu linux system.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

Greg Szorc shows how, in this entry on his blog, to use DTDs and catalogs to validate your XHTML pages with a little help from PHP.

This [validation from an external site like the W3C validator] approach is a good start, but it is far from ideal because it is based on an honor system of sorts. You often forget to validate each change you make and there is always some corner case that you forget. So, what can be done about it? Well, if you find yourself developing in PHP, you can employ the following solution.

The code he includes pulls in the XHTML content from your page (or the output of the framework's view layer) and pushes it into a DOMDocument that's build with the LIBXML_DTDLOAD and LIBXML_DTDATTR options.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of a new book from Packt Publishing that introduces you to the Joomla! content management system and how to create your own bits of functionality for it - Mastering Joomla! 1.5 - Extension and Framework Development.

Planning to write a few extensions for site's I host I was looking for a book that could at least in part be a replacement for this documentation. As I went through the site of Pact publishing My eye fell on this particular book because of the example chapter they show. And indeed now I have the book I'm in no way disappointed.

He mentions the target audience of the book (and how well it hits it), the approach the book takes to the topics it covers and specific looks at several of the chapter topics like web services, error handling, security and plug-in structure.

Matthew Turland set out a while back to develop a bot in PHP. The result of it is Phergie an "an IRC bot written in PHP 5 with an OO API" that can be extended with components for a wide variety of features. Another pleasant offshoot from his project is this first part of two articles on the C7Y community site detailing its creation.

The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.

Matthew talks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.

Derick Rethans has posted about new versions of two PHP extensions with "very distinctive purposes" - VLD and translit.

VLD is for the "hardcore hackers" out there to see what's happening behind the scenes for each request made to PHP and the translit extension makes it easier to "transliterate" information into other formats (with filters like "normalize_numbers" and converting text to Chinese).

You can grab the updated version through the standard pecl interface or from their pages on the PECL site.

In a new post, Greg Beaver talks about a few things, the main one being a new release of the phar extension he's made - phar version 2.0.0a1 - a reworking of the previous functionality with loads of new features including:

• Phar now supports tar and zip archives with the same API that is supports phar archives.
• Phar has a front controller for web applications that fully handles MIME types, supports mod_rewrite-like functionality with far more flexibility
• Phar supports phar:// stream wrappers in include_path for PHP 5.2+
• Phar supports creation and modification of data-only tar and zip archives (no executable phar stub) via the PharData class.

There've also been updates to the manual for the project to reflect this new version of its API. You can download this latest version here: source or Windows DLL.

On DevShed today, they continue their series looking at working with XML in PHP with the DOM functionality with the fifth part of their series, a look at working with HTML strings and file data.

Understanding how to use the methods and properties provided by this library requires a little effort from you, despite its fairly easy learning curve. [...] The DOM XML extension has plenty of options when it comes to moving portions of an XML document (or even the entire document) from one place to another. This is certainly a process that can be performed with minor hassles by utilizing the intuitive DOM API mentioned in the beginning.

They show how to use loadHTML to pull in the text from an HTML string and use loadHTMLFile to pull it in from an external HTML file. Finally, they show how to write the data and whatever changes you might have made to it, back out to a file with saveHTMLFile.

Eirik Hoem has posted a tip for all of the PHP SOAP developers out there - a method for setting the xsi:type correctly for objects sent in the message.

I spent quite some time looking for info on how to specify the xsi:type for the objects, and I finally came across SoapVar. I created a base class which the SOAP classes extended. A method called pack is responsible for setting xsi:type.

In his example, he creates a BaseClass to work from and builds a createCustomer class on top of it, defining a setCustomer function inside. When the new Person is created, a new Customer is too complete with the correctly formatted type on the object.