Lorna Mitchell has a handy tip for those PHPers out there that use Github and want to pull off the issues from their project's Issues List quickly and easily - use their API (super simple).

I looked around for some export functionality for github but I got a lot of posts complaining it wasn't there. Since I hate applications that take your data and refuse to let you remove it, I was disappointed by this news but further inspection showed that although there might be no "export from github" button, there's an API that more than has it covered.

She gives an example of how to fetch only the currently open issues (the important ones) and pull then back through the API as a JSON message. Her little code snippet uses file_get_contents, but this can obviously be adopted to whatever use you might want. You can find out more about the things you can do with the Github API on the develop.github.com site including features to work with organizations, users, pull requests and gists.

In this new entry to his blog Quinton Parker looks at some strangeness he's found around the try/catch functionality in PHP. His specific example involves file_get_contents.

PHP never ceases to amaze me. Just the other day a colleague discovered that you can suppress error messages reported by file_get_contents() using the try-catch statement. That should've raised an eyebrow.

His sample code shows the normal error that a file_get_contents on a nonexistent file would give then wraps it in a try/catch. The same path is put into the file_get_contents but, because of some sort of interesting handling, isn't reported in the catch. He's at a loss and is asking for help figuring this one out from the readers out there. Be sure to leave a comment if you have more info.

In a new post today, Kae Verens takes a look at a method for easy and quick javascript minification with help from a little bit of PHP.

A useful part of minification is that during the act of compiling your minified source, you can also pull in other JavaScript files and compiled them all into one single source. This has a major advantage that there is only one file to download.

The method runs a file_get_contents on each of the javascript files, and pulls their content into a single PHP variable. This value is then just echoed out after it's passes through this minimizer class.

Kae also offers an alternative to performing this expensive operation each time - caching then checking the md5 hash of the cache to see if it's different than the current version. Example code is included.