If you ever find yourself in a situation of having to call a perl script from within PHP, and you want to get the return values from the perl script, you might do it like the following:

$command = "perl /my/perl/script.pl";
$results = exec($command);
// does not print error

If the perl script generates error, you won’t be able to see them, as they are written to stderr.

One solution might be to append the stderr to stdout, therefore getting it into the $results variable.

$command = "perl /my/perl/script.pl 2>&1";
$results = exec($command);
// Prints: Died at /my/perl/script.pl line 25.

As this post explains, 1 means stdout, 2 means stderr. 2>1 might look ok at first sight, but the ’1′ will be interpreted as a filename. Therefore it has to be escaped with &1, resulting in 2>&1.

array_filter($my_array)

array_filter WITHOUT a callback function removes ‘false’, ‘null’ and ” fields from an array.

Moving PHP Associative Array (Dictionaries, whatever..) over for use in Javascript. In JS Associative Array are actually objects, so we might as well make it into one.

echo "var data =" . json_encode($somatic, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT) . ";

NSString *stripped = [unstripped stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@"\n\t "]];

Well, Cocoa, a bit of too much syntactic nutrasweet here. Take a look at PHP and wheep:

$stripped = trim($unstripped);

(Yes, I am aware that’s somewhat of an unfair comparion, but still…)

require "<a href="http://github.com/jdp/twitterlibphp">twitter.lib.php</a>";
 
$username = "<a href="http://twitter.com/trembl/">trembl</a>";
$password = "&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;";
 
$twitter = new Twitter($username, $password);
 
$options = array(
	"profile_background_color" => "fff",
	"profile_text_color" => "fff",
	"profile_link_color" => "fff",
	"profile_sidebar_fill_color" => "fff",
	"profile_sidebar_border_color" => "fff"
);
 
$update_response = $twitter->updateProfileColors($options);
print_r($update_response);

Nice, isn’t it?

PHP
explode(“, ” , “One, Two, Three”);

Objective-C
NSArray *listItems = [@"One, Two, Three" componentsSeparatedByString:@", "];

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/217411

http://www.pair.com/support/knowledge_base/authoring_development/system_cgi_php-cgiwrap.html

Getting ImageMagick to work by calling system() in PHP turned out to be more troublesome that originally assumed. Of course, Safe-Mode has be off, the dirs need to have the appropriate permission, and the absolute paths to ‘convert’ and your files should be set.

But still, it would not work. Despite executing directly in the shell quite nicely. The revelation came late, but better than never:

IM apparently hate single quote ‘ ‘, and absolutely insists on double quotes ” ” to wrap it’s arguments in.

Can not really say, that this is well thought out… Anyways…