BRADINO

Dayparting on Datetime Field using Substring

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:26:16 +0000

Today I needed a quick and easy way to count the number of records for each of the 24 hours in a day for records in a mysql database that has a datetime field. I came up with the following query to solve that problem:

SELECT count( SUBSTRING( `datetime` , 12, 2 ) ) AS `num` , SUBSTRING( `datetime` , 12, 2 ) AS `hour`
FROM `table`
GROUP BY SUBSTRING( `datetime` , 12, 2 )
ORDER BY `num` DESC

PHP Screen Scraping

admin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:20:47 +0000

I had a request recently for help with scraping a little content from http://www.newyork411.com :)

So here we go. This time I made a quick PHP class with some basic functions to grab the source fo the page as well as fetchBetween, fetchAfter, fetchAll, etc. You can get the latest version of the class at http://www.bradino.com/downloads/cScrape.txt - be sure to rename it to cScrape.php. If there is an interest I can continue to develop this class a tool for screens craping with PHP.

Anyway so here we go scraping all the companies from this page http://www.newyork411.com/Ad_Agencies_Production_Companies/category-cid-50553.htm as well as the details of each company, found by clicking on the company.

Step 1 - Initialize the class and fetch the page:

include ('cScrape.php');

$scrape = new Scrape();

$url = 'http://www.newyork411.com/Ad_Agencies_Production_Companies/category-cid-50553.htm';

$scrape->fetch($url);

$data = $scrape->removeNewlines($scrape->result);

Step 2 - find your anchor and get the chunk of html that contains what you want

$data = $scrape->fetchBetween(','

',$data,true);

$rows = $scrape->fetchAllBetween(','',$data,true);

Step 3 - parse out the individual values and print out the first record for demo

foreach ($rows as $id => $row){

$record = array();

$cells = $scrape->fetchAllBetween(','',$row,true);

$record['company'] = strip_tags($cells[1]);

$url = 'http://www.newyork411.com' . $scrape->fetchBetween(''">',$cells[1],false);

$url = str_replace(' ','%20',$url);

$scrape->fetch($url);

$data2 = $scrape->removeNewlines($scrape->result);

$data2 = $scrape->fetchBetween('

','

',$data2,true);

$data2 = $scrape->fetchAfter('',$data2,false);

$details = explode('
',$data2);

$record['address'] = $details[0];

$location = explode(',',$details[1]);

$record['city'] = trim($location[0]);

$location = explode(' ',trim($location[1]));

$record['state'] = trim($location[0]);

$record['zip'] = trim($location[1]);

for($i=2; $i<=5; $i++){

$detail = trim($details[$i]);

if(substr($detail,0,6)=='Phone:') $record['phone'] = str_replace('Phone: ','',$detail);

else if(substr($detail,0,4)=='Fax:') $record['fax'] = str_replace('Fax: ','',$detail);

else if(substr($detail,0,4)=='Web:') $record['web'] = strip_tags(str_replace('Web: ','',$detail));

else if(substr($detail,0,6)=='Email:') $record['email'] = strip_tags(str_replace('Email: ','',$detail));

}

print_r($record);

die();
}

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Manually Run Webalizer via SSH - webstatmng

admin — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:23:54 +0000

In Plesk say you have a domain bradino.com and you have not enabled webalizer. Later you need to enable it but no statistics show because it only parses the log files once per day but you want the stats right now. Here is the SSH command you can run to manually run webalizer.

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/webstatmng --calculate-rotated-statistics --stat-prog=webalizer --domain-name=bradino.com

I am sure that this is different for every system, but this worked for me running Plesk 8.1 on Linux.

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Http Authentication using PHP

admin — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:13:12 +0000

There are two easy ways to login to a page protected by htaccess using PHP. You need to have the username and password of course... Anyway, a good use for this is if you want to scrape a page behind an htaccess login, or if you need to do something progammatically behind htaccess password protection.

1) You can access the page as:
http://username:password@domain.com/folder/page.php

2) You can set an extra parameter in curl:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "username:password");

php htaccess login php http authentication php htaccess php login http authentication

Automatically Login Bookmark

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:13:16 +0000

Here is a quick little trick to automate logging into online applications. Simply create an HTML file and put it on your desktop (or wherever you like), and then by opening this file, you can login to most applications automatically. All you have to change in the file is the url to post the form to and the field names of the values to post. In this simple demo the form will post the variables "username" and "password" to https://www.domain.com/login.php.

</span></span>Auto Login Script<span style="color: #009900;"><span style="color: #000000; font-weight: bold;">

onload="document.loginform.submit();">
Logging into Application...
name="loginform" id="loginform" method="post"
action="https://www.domain.com/login.php">
type="hidden" name="username" value="admin"/>
type="hidden" name="password" value="secret"/>

Warning: This is not secure, as the password is stored in plain-text and is accessible to anyone with access to your computer. Please use with extreme caution.

auto login password manager automatically login quick login

PHP Array of US States

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:46:49 +0000

This simple array of states can be used to poulate a dropdown menu on a form, or in some kind of lookup from state code to name, or any loop action you desire.

$states = array('AL'=>"Alabama",
'AK'=>"Alaska",
'AZ'=>"Arizona",
'AR'=>"Arkansas",
'CA'=>"California",
'CO'=>"Colorado",
'CT'=>"Connecticut",
'DE'=>"Delaware",
'DC'=>"District Of Columbia",
'FL'=>"Florida",
'GA'=>"Georgia",
'HI'=>"Hawaii",
'ID'=>"Idaho",
'IL'=>"Illinois",
'IN'=>"Indiana",
'IA'=>"Iowa",
'KS'=>"Kansas",
'KY'=>"Kentucky",
'LA'=>"Louisiana",
'ME'=>"Maine",
'MD'=>"Maryland",
'MA'=>"Massachusetts",
'MI'=>"Michigan",
'MN'=>"Minnesota",
'MS'=>"Mississippi",
'MO'=>"Missouri",
'MT'=>"Montana",
'NE'=>"Nebraska",
'NV'=>"Nevada",
'NH'=>"New Hampshire",
'NJ'=>"New Jersey",
'NM'=>"New Mexico",
'NY'=>"New York",
'NC'=>"North Carolina",
'ND'=>"North Dakota",
'OH'=>"Ohio",
'OK'=>"Oklahoma",
'OR'=>"Oregon",
'PA'=>"Pennsylvania",
'PR'=>"Puerto Rico",
'RI'=>"Rhode Island",
'SC'=>"South Carolina",
'SD'=>"South Dakota",
'TN'=>"Tennessee",
'TX'=>"Texas",
'UT'=>"Utah",
'VT'=>"Vermont",
'VA'=>"Virginia",
'WA'=>"Washington",
'WV'=>"West Virginia",
'WI'=>"Wisconsin",
'WY'=>"Wyoming");

So a simple example to populate a dropdown form menu of states you could simply spin through the array like so:

foreach ($states as $code => $state){

echo "{$code}\">{$state}\n";

}

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Programmer Joke

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:12:20 +0000

I heard this joke recently and thought that I should share it with fellow programmers:

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None - it's a hardware issue :)

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Include Path

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:44:55 +0000

Often times you need to use the complete include path, not just the relative path. You can discover the complete include path, even if you are on a shared host, by examining the $_SERVER array. The SCRIPT_FILENAME value is the complete path to the file that is calling it. So an easy way to see what the full path to a file is to put this line of code at the top of a file:

echo $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'];

Now you know the complete path to where you are working with the files at. You can use the base include path in your classes or whatever.

php include path $_SERVER array document root base include

PHP Variable Variables

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:15:10 +0000

In PHP sometimes you may want to have variable variables or dynamic function calls for whatever reason. PHP allows you to programmatically construct variable and function names. Here is an example of a variable function call from within a class. Thsi would call the function named myFunc:

$variable = 'myFunc';
$this->{$variable}();

Sometimes you may want to create variable names on the fly, let's say in a loop where you are updating many records from a form post. This code would make a variable named commonCust and assign it a value of 1:

$custom = 'Cust';
${'common'.$custom} = '1';

variable variables variable class variables dynamic variables dynamic variable names

Javascript Split Function

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:16:11 +0000

The Javascript split() function works much the same as the php split() or explode() functions. Basically you take a string at break it up everywhere the delimiter character occurs and return the new strings in an array. So for example, let's say you have a string like this:

Which is obviously a simple a pipe-delimited string of colors. So to make this into an array we would use the split function.

[script]var colorArray = colorString.split("|");[/script]

Now you have a simple array of colors and can access them as you would any array, either in a loop or by the numeric index, whatever...

[script]
var message = "My favorite color is " + colorArray[3] ;
alert(message);
[/script]

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