Applies to:

• PHP 5.4
• MySQL 5.1.4
• Databases initially setup with collation 'latin1_swedish_ci'

What
Another article trying to help people display foreign characters on their website without the funny question marks in diamond symbols and how I solved it in my case.

What?
A quick note on a htaccess rewrite rule I'm liking.

What does it do?
What I type:

http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/videos.html

Sends this to server:

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?myFolder=blog&myFiles=videos

How?

Previously titled
Fix PHP cURL: parser error: Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content

What?
This is an article with notes for me on how to convert some received XML encoded in UTF-16 to some JSON in UTF-8. If it were entirely in UTF-8, I would simply load the received XML with SimpleXML and use the built-in PHP JSON_encode function. I ran into the following errors:

Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [<a href='simplexmlelement.--construct'>simplexmlelement.--construct</a>]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content in /public_html/.../.../my_script.php on line ###

Warning: simplexml_load_string() [<a href='function.simplexml-load-string'>function.simplexml-load-string</a>]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Document labelled UTF-16 but has UTF-8 content in /public_html/.../.../my_script.php on line ###

Why?
So I've googled, binged and yahoo'd for this and although there are some solutions that deal with loading UTF16 content into SimpleXMLElement or simplexml_load_string, it doesn't solve my problem. I'm receiving XML data within a cURL result but I get the above error with using either "SimpleXMLElement" or "simplexml_load_string". Returning the XML with cURL isn't a problem, but I want to convert it to JSON and I usually use a PHP function to load the data into an XML array and use the built-in PHP function: "json_encode".

How?

What?
A note for myself on some code to convert a string of two names into a string made up of the first name and then using the initial of the second name.

-- What I have
John Smith
Fred.Bloggs

-- What I want
John S.
Fred B.

How?

What?
For those of you who use Preg_Replace. Preg_replace is a function that uses regular expressions to search and replace a string.

Why?
Because my understanding with regular expressions is shady and varies from language to language, I've written this article as a quick reference point.

How?

What?
Just a quick note on how to format a given filesize and to reduce the display output to a small string, eg:

   196 bytes          : displays as => "196 bytes"
   12945 bytes        : displays as => "12 Kb"
   1478515 bytes      : displays as => "1 Mb"
   8798745455 bytes   : displays as => "8 Gb"

I added this article because when I was only trying to look up how to do this, this nut "the Storyteller" went and carried out a benchmark test on the most popular ways of counting the occurrence of a specific word within a string of text.

The Issue

Basically you have a HTML form with an input field type of 'FILE' (ie. <input type="file" name="file_to_upload" />) and want a PHP file to process this.  This example applies to a Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) environment.

 

The Solution
1.  The first thing to do is check that your HTML form is setup to do this: