[...]... to worry about this; PHP Programming Solutions offers ready-made solutions to 250+ commonly encountered problems, making use of both native and external libraries to teach developers the most effective way to use PHP in their development projects xv xvi PHP Programming Solutions Overview PHP Programming Solutions is a full-fledged developer guide with two primary goals: to deliver solutions to commonly... read—instead, consider working your way through the xvii xviii PHP Programming Solutions introductory PHP tutorials at http://www .php. net/tut .php and http:// www.melonfire.com/community/columns/trog/archives php? category =PHP, or purchasing a beginner guide such as How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL (McGraw-Hill, 2005; http://www everythingphpmysql.com/), and then return to this title Organization... dynamically generating PDF files; and creating e-mail messages with attachments xix xx PHP Programming Solutions Chapter 12, “Working with Exceptions and Other Miscellanea” discusses common problems related to exception handling and error processing It also includes solutions for profiling and benchmarking your PHP scripts; executing external programs from within PHP; altering the PHP configuration at... the wide array of built-in functions and ready-made PHP widgets available to them Task-based categorization makes it easy to locate solutions, and each section comes with working code, a detailed explanation, and applicable usage tips and guidelines The solutions described use both PHP s native functions and offthe-shelf PEAR classes PHP Programming Solutions includes coverage of a wide variety of categories,... Generating Unpronounceable Passwords 1 2 PHP Programming Solutions I f you’re like most novice PHP developers, you probably have only a passing acquaintance with PHP s string functions Sure, you know how to print output to a Web page, and you can probably split strings apart and glue them back together again But there’s a lot more to PHP s string toolkit than this: PHP has more than 175 string manipulation... developers across the world Within the PHP community, the fruits of this creativity may be found in PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (http://pear .php. net/), and PECL, the PHP Extension Community Library (http://pecl .php. net/), which contains hundreds of ready-made widgets and extensions that developers can use to painlessly add new functionality to PHP Using these widgets is often a more... executing external programs from within PHP; altering the PHP configuration at run time; creating compiled PHP bytecode; and localizing PHP applications Companion Web Site You can find the PHP code for every single solution in this book on the companion Web site, at http://www .php- programming- solutions. com Code listings are organized by chapter and problem number, and may be directly downloaded and... Errors 12.7 Checking Version Information 12.8 Altering PHP s Run-Time Configuration 12.9 Checking Loaded Extensions 12.10 Using Strict Standards 12.11 Profiling PHP Scripts 12.12 Debugging PHP Scripts 12.13 Benchmarking PHP Scripts 12.14 Creating PHP Bytecode 12.15 Creating Standalone PHP Executables 12.16 Localizing Strings 12.17 Executing... the ASCII code for a character: < ?php // define character $char = "\r"; // retrieve ASCII code // result: 13 $asc = ord($char); echo $asc; ?> Use the chr() function to get the character corresponding to an ASCII code: < ?php // define ASCII code $asc = 65; // retrieve character // result: "A" $char = chr($asc); echo $char; ?> 9 10 PHP Programming Solutions Comments PHP s ord() function retrieves the... you like ᭤ If you’re not very experienced with PHP, you might find it easier to read the problems and their solutions sequentially, so that you learn basic techniques in a structured manner This approach is recommended for users new to the language ᭤ If you’ve already used PHP, or if you’re experienced in another programming language and are switching to PHP, you might prefer to use this book as a desktop . way to use PHP in their development projects. xvi PHP Programming Solutions Overview PHP Programming Solutions is a full-fledged developer guide with two primary goals: to deliver solutions. Agents. Read more about him and PHP Programming Solutions at http://www .php- programming- solutions. com. About the Technical Reviewer Chris has been involved in the PHP community for about eight. site, PHPDeveloper .org, to share the latest happenings and opinions from other PHPers all around the Web. Chris has written for PHP publications such as php| architect and the International PHP