Tag: PHP (Page 8 of 12)

Using cURL to Determine If the Specified URL Is a Valid Page

April 30, 2019 / Tom

Earlier this month, I wrote about finding the destination of a redirect using cURL in PHP. This can be a useful function to use whenever:

you know the URLs with which you’re dealing are going to redirect,
you know that the number of redirects will be limited to one.

Granted, in the latter case, it’s becoming more difficult because sites like, say, Twitter, have multiple redirects before you get to the destination.

But that’s a topic for another post (unless you just want to implement a recursive or iterative way of working through requests until you find the final destination).

Anyway, there’s another thing that can also be useful whenever you’re working with redirects and with cURL, and that’s determining if the specified URL takes you to a valid page.

How to Manipulate the DOM Using PHP

April 23, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to manipulating the DOM, the first thing many of us likely think of is using JavaScript to do whatever it is we need to do.

Not only does the language natively support functions for doing this, newer features of ES6 give us more powerful ways to build client-side scripts. And if you’re using jQuery with WordPress, then you have the same library of functions for, ahem, querying the DOM that we’ve had for years.

But manipulating the DOM on the client-side isn’t always the best option. Instead, you may want to do so on the server-side. And because of some of the features built into PHP, it’s not much different from how we do things using JavaScript.

Manipulate the DOM Using PHP: Manipulate the DOM Using PHP: DOmDocument

Other than, of course, we’re doing so on the server.

Finding the Destination of a Redirect with PHP

April 3, 2019 / Tom

Recently, I was working on a project that was communicating with a third-party API that, like many APIs, sends back a lot of data part of which includes a URL for the product associated with the API.

The thing about the API that was being returned was not the proper destination URL. Instead, it was a URL that ultimately redirected to another URL.

So imagine hitting, say, acme.site-info.com and having it direct to acme.com. We do this manually all the time, but I needed to get the actual – or the final – destination of the direct from the URL.

And finding the destination of a redirect with PHP is easy; however, this does assume there’s only a single redirect.

Nonetheless, here’s how to do it.

WordPress Class Serialization with PHP

February 26, 2019 / Tom

If you’re used to working with models (in any foundation or framework, but specifically WordPress), then there’s a chance that you may need to serialize an instance of the model at some point.

Sure, writing the class to a database using PHP’s built-in functions is easy enough; however, introducing a bit of flexibility especially as it relates to making it available on other platforms is important.

For example, let’s say you’re building an application on WordPress that’s going to have some type of unique piece of information represented in a model. The model will then be accessible via a mobile application through the REST API.

WordPress Class Serialization: PHP

Arguably, one of the easiest ways to get this done is to use JSON. It’s a format that works across various languages and platforms, can be easily serialized and de-serialized by said platforms, and sent across the wire as needed.

And it’s incredibly easy to implement this in PHP. You just need to make sure your class implements the JsonSerializable interface.

WordPress Class Serialization: PHP

From the documentation, the interface does the following:

Objects implementing JsonSerializable can customize their JSON representation when encoded with json_encode().

The only method a class needs to provide is jsonSerialize, and though it’s likely you will want to serialize all of the properties of an object (as well as its state whenever its called), you can customize the implementation however you’d like.

Writing Loops in PHP: Two Ways; Same Thing

January 16, 2019 / Tom

When you’re working with a collection in PHP, most notably, arrays in PHP, there are two ways in which you primarily see the information manipulated:

through for loops,
through a variety of the array functions that PHP provides.

For what it’s worth, I think the array functions provide greater readability but they have been shown to be slower (especially with larger data – with smaller data, it’s naturally going to be negligible).

I often work with for loops and related functions to achieve the same thing but I thought it might be worth look at an example from the previous post and how I used the array functions to achieve the same things as a for loop.

Ultimately, this is is a comparison post but I think it’s good to see how the same code can be written in different ways.