Some tips or useful info about PHP that i found interesting or useful at the moment of writing.

php-tricks-n-tips.md

PHP trick-tips

Some tips or useful info that i found interesting or useful at the moment of writing.

UTF-8

USE IT EVERYWHERE. THE END.

Working with Databases

• PDO vs MySQLi
• PDO Tutorial for MySQL Developers
• Prepared database statements

Data validation

Based on stackoverflow article. Sanitize & Filter -> Validate -> Prepare for storage -> Outputting back to HTML

Sanitize & Filter

• Make sure field has correct data type by using is_xxx function or casting user data
• Escape HTML with htmlspecialchars() or with htmlentities()(used only when 100% needed)
  • htmlentities vs htmlspecialchars
• Or instead of escaping HTML, strip HTML tags with strip_tags(), but better yet with HTML Purifier- From PHP >=5.2 version you can use Data Filtering extension

Validation

Never ever rely on client-side validation, its just for UX.

• earlier mention Data Filtering extension provides some usefull validation methods

Prepare for database storage

• mysqli_real_escape_string() - if using mysqli
• PDO::quote()

Outputting back to HTML

• if content doesn't use html tags which you have managed before then use htmlspecialchars()
• for javascript objects use json_encode()

Magic qoutes

TODO http://aaroncameron.net/article.html?aID=59 http://php.net/manual/en/function.addslashes.php https://www.google.lv/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=what+are+magic+quotes+in+php+w

Closures and lambdas

• https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures

Creation within class definition

The only small difference is that closures defined in class methods may also access the class and the current object via $this. Since $this is saved “within the closure” the corresponding object will live at least as long as the closure.

Because not all closures defined in class methods need $this, it is possible to declare a lambda function to be static:

 class Example {
   public function doSomething () {
     $x = 4;
     $closure = static function ($y) use ($x) {
       return $x + $y;
     };
     return $closure (6);
   }
 }