PHP code snippets and tips for customizing your own website, and for generating dynamic content with PHP.
If you’re using PHP mktime() to make a timestamp for a specific moment in time that should not change, then be sure to first set the default timezone to UTC. Otherwise, the dynamic behavior of mktime() is to modify or change your time, based on the timezone settings on your server. This may be desirable … Read more →
After running several benchmark tests, I find that the PHP strftime() is faster than date(). I tested each one creating the same datetime string in this format: ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM’. The test iterates 100000 times over each function. I repeated this test several times. Each time, I alternated which function ran first. Here are the benchmark … Read more →
This is a handy template for running speed tests on your own PHP functions. (This would, of course, also work for benchmarking PHP’s own native functions, but I use this for testing my own random functions. You could also benchmark one of your own functions against a PHP built-in function.) This is useful for comparing … Read more →
Here are some PHP functions to check if an INDEX exists in a MySQL table. Here is also a function that adds a new INDEX to a table. The first function lets you check for a specific INDEX (or KEY). The second function lists all indexes of a table, with their Key_name and Column_name. The … Read more →
This is a PHP function that will return the number lines in a text file. Use it to count lines in a data file. See a usage example below. The function takes one parameter, $file, the path to the data text file. It will return 0 if the file is not found. Usage Example This … Read more →
This is a useful PHP function when you just need to pull a few lines from a very large data text file. For example, say you have a text file full of 1.5 GB of data, and you don’t want to open the file because it’s so large, but you just want to see a … Read more →
This is a quick PHP function to count rows in a MySQL database table. It takes 2 parameters, which are: $link This is the MySQL connection object which is made, for example, by using mysqli_connect() or mysqli_init(). $table The name of the table that you want to count rows for. The function will a return … Read more →
If you’re using system(“unzip archive.zip”) to unzip an archive file in PHP, and you want to catch errors, you’ll notice that it only returns a number for the error code. Here are the error codes (exit status codes) and meanings for the unzip command. This PHP array matches the unzip error code with its meaning. … Read more →
This function does not choose for you what units to convert to, but rather lets you specify what unit type you want to convert Bytes into. You can choose to convert Bytes into either Kilobytes, Megabytes, or Gigabytes by passing a parameter. Here is the PHP function: (See below for usage examples, and also 3 … Read more →
This is how to make a PHP mysqli DELETE query with a prepared statement. This example includes error checking at every step. Error checking will help you debug your prepared mysqli query when it’s failing and you don’t know why. You can use this example to help you debug any mysqli prepared statement, not only … Read more →