Ip to Location Many applications need to get information about the geographical location of the user/visitor on their websites. This can be done in many ways. There are online services like ipinfodb and geoio that provide web based api to get the geolocation information about a given ip address. Services like Maxmind geoip provide free… Read More »
Parsing dates Most php applications need to parse dates and convert them to timestamps for example. Parsing is also necessary to convert the date into a more standard format like yyyy-mm-dd which can be stored in a database like mysql. Mysql database stores dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd like 2009-04-15. However humans are more used… Read More »
The following function will parse a given text and convert all the urls into links. It does this using regular expressions. It converts email addresses to mailto links as well. Code function parse_links($str) { $str = str_replace('www.', 'http://www.', $str); $str = preg_replace('|http://([a-zA-Z0-9-./]+)|', '<a href="http://$1">$1</a>', $str); $str = preg_replace('/(([a-z0-9+_-]+)(.[a-z0-9+_-]+)*@([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})/', '<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>', $str); return $str; }
Database applications written in php often need to export data for reporting purpose. A popular export format is excel. Excel is a spreadsheet that lays out data in a grid format. Excel itself is a microsoft proprietory format. There are many libraries available for php like Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer pear package etc that can do the job…. Read More »