Here’s another short post detailing some odd behavior in PHP.

Let’s have a look at the following simple piece of code:

$arr = array(
  1 => 'Hello',
  1.5 =>'World',
  true=>"!"
);
var_dump($arr);

What would the output of this be? Surprisingly this does the following:

array(1) {
  [1]=>
  string(1 ...

Common Crawl is a fantastic project which provides search data to people. This provides an opportunity for smaller companies to create a search engine using the results, among other things.

By default PHP adds an “X-Powered-By” header which provides the PHP version. Since the common crawl data also provides header ...

PHP has some idiosyncrasies that can cause odd or counter intuitive behavior. This will be a series of short posts covering some of these situations.

Let’s have a look at the following simple piece of code:

$arr = array('foo','bar','baz');


foreach($arr as &$item){
   echo "First array: ".$item ...

PHP 5.5 added a really nice feature: Generators.

Generators allow you to create a function that returns an list of items without having to create a (possibly very large) array first.

Here’s a simple “classic” generator example. Suppose you wanted to create a range function (PHP provides this ...

Being mildly paranoid about my data I sometimes worry what would happen to my repositories and gists on GitHub and BitBucket (mid way through drafting this post GitHub went down. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you!). Luckily both these services provide an API ...

The CLI to php allows checking for syntax errors using php -l I’ve created a very basic script which will recursively check folders for php files with syntax errors. It’s intended to quickly show syntax errors in a large application. It’s available here: https://github.com/JimMackin ...