Talk In Code

If you are running a JavaScript example page you can use the following function that will take the last script element on the page and print it out in a code tag. It uses JQuery to do the work, so you will need to include that library before using this function.

<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
 function displaySource(name) {
  $('<code>'
   + $('#display-' + name).prevAll('script').eq(0).html()
   .replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g, '')
   .split('\n').slice(1, -1).join('\n')
   .replace(/(^|\n) /g, '$1')
   .replace(/('[^']*')/g, '<em>$1</em>')
  + '</code>')
  .insertAfter('#display-' + name);
 }
//]]></script>

The function works by selecting the current script tag and finding all script elements before it. It then selects the first one it finds and outputs the contents to a code tag. It uses a few regular expressions to convert some of the characters to a more human readable format. The function is called like this.

<script type="text/javascript" id="display-test">displaySource("test");</script>

The first thing you learn about in PHP is probably how to print something. This is usually done with a call to the echo or print, but there is another way to print things by writing content directly to the output buffer. The following code looks like you are writing to a file, but the text will appear in the browser window because we are writing to the php://output output stream.

$fp = fopen("php://output", 'r+');
fputs($fp, "Hello World");

Or another way…

file_put_contents("php://output", "Hello World");

The php://output stream is an encapsulation between PHP and the browser. The stream doesn’t really exist, but PHP knows what to do with it.

Why would you ever need to know this? Well lets say that you had an application that produced some logs when users performed certain actions. You might want to print those to screen in your development environment rather than save them. So rather than altering the code to see what environment you are in you can just set a configuration option so that you write to php://output instead of the log file. This means that your logs will appear with your output.

PHPDocumentor is a fast and convent way of creating API documentation for your PHP programs and classes. If you are familiar with the world of Java, it works in much the same way as the JavaDoc program, indeed, it is based on this program.

PHPDocumentor can be run in a number of different ways, but I have found that the easiest way is to, again, use PEAR to install everything you need. To install PHPDocumentor using PEAR use the following command.

phpdoc install phpdocumentor

To run PHPDocumentor and see a list of commands just type in the following:

phpdoc -h

To run PHPDocumentor you need to provide a couple of options, these are:

• t The documentation directory (ie. where your documentation files will go).
• o The output format (e. HTML, PDF etc), which is defined as output:converter:template directory.
• d The directory (ie. where your source code files are).

Use the following syntax to run PHPDocumentor, using the above parameters.

C:\projectDir>phpdoc -t "c:\projectDir" -o HTML:default:default -d "c:\projectDir\docs"

The output format defined here is HTML, with the default style and format. This is as a document with frames and in the default style that the program uses. To see what sort of formats are available go to the PHPDocumentor install directory at <your PHP directory>\data\PhpDocumentor\phpDocumentor\Converters.

To get a different style on your PHPDocs use the following value for the -o parameter.

HTML:default:l0l33t

To create a PDF of your documentation use the following.

PDF:default:default

To product output that looks like the PHP home page use the following:

HTML:smarty:php

You might be asking how you get your PHP code to generate this documentation. Although this is not complicated, there is rather a lot to go over and so this will be the subject of a different blog post.

The contents of phpinfo() are quite useful, and it is usually the first thing that many developers perform to make sure that PHP is installed. However, printing out the phpinfo() function can lead to a security risk because it displays a lot of information about the server.

Here is how to write the contents of the phpinfo() function to a file.

ob_start();
phpinfo();
$info = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
 
$fp = fopen("phpinfo.html", "w+");
fwrite($fp, $info);
fclose($fp);

This is an example of output buffering.