I had the privilege of doing a short presentation at our local CFUG meeting last night, the topic being "Coldfusion Vs PHP", so thought I'd share the slides and some brief commentary on some of them. We didn't record the meeting, so what you're about to see is an abbreviated version.

After several hours of hair pulling, I finally rectified an issue sending mail via Smartermail 6.0 using PHP's "mail" function. The exact same (crappy) code worked fine on the old freeBSD box, running PHP 4.9 and Apache. But when I migrated the same code to Windows 2008 running IIS7, PHP 4.9 (just to save me potential hassle with upgrading to 5.x), and Smartermail 6.0, I would get delivery log entries like this:

Googling turned up lots of Ruby dudes and dudettes who were encountering the same error trying to send mail via SMTP in Ruby, only since they were using a Ruby class to do it, the true cause of the problem was out of their reach. In a nutshell, the error is generated by a malformed "FROM" address. After trying all manner of experimentation, I finally rectified the issue by removing the space between the colon and the header variables. Here's the original code that created the mail headers, and broke my send attempt:

Here's what the working version of that snippet looks like:

 
So, if you are encountering a 501 error, check your code to ensure that you don't have any extra characters or spaces in your values, such as square brackets, extra opening or closing pointy brackets (< >), and the like.

Just for entertainment purposes and to give you something to wag your head at, let me show you the complete code my predecessor wrote to generate the email headers and values:

This is nothing revolutionary, but since it was new to me and it DID take me far longer finding the solution via Googling than it should have, I'm posting it here for my own and others' reference.

Let's say you need to do some search and replace of a specified email address within a BUTT LOAD of PHP files you inherited from your predecessor, but you don't want to have to download the whole can of worms via FTP, only the relevant files (I know, I know: why did my predecessor hard code the email address all over the place?). Anyway, this next snippet will give you back a list of all PHP files containing the text specified:

The results will look something like this:

Told ya, nothing special about this post! :)

Doug out.

For those PHPers out there who are doing an export to Excel, I thought I'd share the solution I came up with. I realize there are already a gabillion examples out there, but I merged some of the better approaches from a few of them that made it fairly elegant, I think (such as leveraging the implode, array_keys, and array_values functions).

Without further adieux...

At times it is necessary to dynamically create delimited lists of items, such as in the WHERE clause of SQL queries. For instance, perhaps our query could have from one to N different OR statements in the WHERE clause based on selections a user makes on a search form, something like

Looping over items and knowing when to insert a delimiter and when not to takes some extra coding, because you have to track if this is the first or last item in the list or array. Instead of worrying about tracking first or last items, what I do is simply insert the items I need to delimit into an array, and then dump them all out to a properly delimited statement by leveraging the 'implode' function.

Here's a snippet of code I use to create a dynamic WHERE clause for a sql query based on filter criteria submitted via a form. In this example, I am processing a submitted filter criteria named 'rankfilter' to build the WHERE clause for my query:

Don't focus so much on the switch/case statement as you do on the fact that every time I create a new OR statement, I'm pushing it onto my $aORs array. After I've created all of the needed ORs, I invoke the 'implode' function and spit out a nice WHERE clause where each statement is separated by " OR ".

Resulting SQL:

You can use this same approach any time you need to create some kind of delimited list of values. All you have to do is replace the first parameter in the 'implode' function with whatever you need the delimiter to be.

Hope this helps.

I am a ColdFusion guy, without a doubt. At my new job, however, I have inherited the maintenance and enhancement duties of a large PHP application as well. One of the enhancements I was asked to make was to produce a select list of names that could be filtered on the fly as the user typed into a text box. Being somewhat new to PHP and having had to figure out a good approach to creating this feature, I thought I'd share it in case it helps someone else.

Picture if you will, a select list filled with names and immediately below it a text box for filtering that list. Better yet, here's what mine looks like:

As the user begins typing in the text box, the select list begins to be filtered, re-filtering as each letter is added or removed.

I'm using the Prototype javascript library to perform the ajax calls, and a PHP script I call "adminAjax.php" that listens for and responds to those ajax calls. First off then, the HTML and JS that sets up the user interface:

basically, I have one div that will hold the select list ("namelist"), and some js that, on page load, will bind the 'filterByName' function to the keyup event on the 'fltName' textbox. So, with every character entered or removed from that textbox, the current value will be passed to the filterByName function. Here's the filterByName function:

Okay, now on to adminAjax.php.

I'm using this template exclusively for ajax responses, so what I did was to create a switch/case statement that routes to the appropriate function based on the incoming 'actionval' parameter. Important to note: in my case, I chose to create the entire select list on this end and then return the completed HTML. The Updater that made the Ajax call will then place the returned HTML into the target div for us. Here's the code: