Custom RecursiveIterator

PHP RecursiveIterator and its relatives are quite handy in any tree-related situation. Probably the most used is RecursiveDirectoryIterator for getting all files recursively in a directory. But this family of iterators has some issues to be addressed so that developers do not end up fleeing. First, you must not fear SPL. But there's more. Let's see…

Sublime Text 2 snippet Getter/Setter

It's almost a month since I embraced Sublime Text as my daily editor, even for coding. And I love how much easier my life is now. As an example, here's a snippet I just made to avoid writing all that getter/setter bolierplate over and over again in PHP…

Symfony2: Repositories in DIC

Easy recipe to define a Doctrine repository in your Dependency Injection Container:

!isset, is_null, empty: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hi everyone, you programmers trying to grasp the intricacies of PHP. As coders, our raw material is, and will be, information and knowledge. But lack of knowledge does not give us some information, too? Is of this absence that we will discuss today: How to know if we don't know something in PHP. And our main tools are isset, is_null and empty. Want to know more about them? Which one is The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?

Exchanging currencies with Zend_Currency_CurrencyInterface

As many companies offering online services do, we handle multiple currencies. This often involves querying external services to know the real value of the currency exchange. Previously, this logic was scattered all over the code, even copy-pasted in multiple files, and is pretty hard to mantain, let alone to test.

So, in my work detecting and extracting patterns from old spaghetti code, I came with the following solution: A Service layer.

How to detect if a class implements an Interface?

I'm in the real need to know if, given a string className or object, it implements a particular interface. I'm specially interested in the string className part.

During the search, many seemingly valid options appeared: instanceof, is_subclass_of, is_a, ReflectionClass::ImplementsInterface, class_implements… Which one to use? Let's do some testing!

Simplest Credit Card Validator

Searching for a simple credit card validation algorithm? The Luhn algorithm is a simple checksum that validates most identification numbers, mainly used in credit card ones. It's implementation is quite simple. Need one? Just come along!

Safe RecursiveDirectoryIterator

I love SPL... so simple, so powerful, so flexible.

RecursiveDirectoryIterator was having problems while scanning a directory and threw me some nice errors on permissions, so I coded the snippet below...

PNG study with CSS Sprites

While writing my first CSS Sprite article, I created a simple, in no way efficient, sprite generator. Last week I needed to show some numbers to the project manager to convince him the sprite technique is worth using, so I modified a bit the program to arrange the icons in different layouts and show the size savings.

Want to know with which layout I improved the file size by 78.6%?

Refactoring code smell

I work every day with PHP, developing management tools for the company where I work, but when I accepted this job I was a pure noob in this language. In fact I was hired for some C++ programming, but soon my tasks evolved so that wherever there's code, I was there too. So, learning PHP was the logical evolution in this case.

As you can imagine, being a PHP developer fresh from the oven, I ended up committing many atrocities in my code. And now is when, with some more maturity and knowledge, I can detect, by sense of smell, where those design flaws are. It's a fact, bad code smells.

Real IP Problem and X-Forwarded-For header

Someone has been in a situation like this? I bet it

• We need a way to know whether a user is logged in or not.
• Easy as pie. Go on sessions with him.
• We can't rely on the user's browser to allow cookies.
• Well, we rely on the user's browser to have JavaScript, so why...?
• I said no cookies. Use the IP address.