50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools is just that: An awesome list of stuff that makes PHP development so much easier. A list like this would have saved so much time when I started learning PHP, but most of the stuff on that list didn't even exist.

I use the PEAR Mail package quite often in projects that require sending email -- either user-generated or system-level notification emails. I recently wrote something at work that required CCing the user a copy of the email. My first thought was that simply adding CC headers with the users' email address would suffice, but that just isn't the case.

Since mail headers can be modified to state anything you want, PEAR Mail doesn't actually use them to to figure out where to send the email (adding the CC header works fine and the users' email address even shows up in the CC field, but they never receive the email).

A comment by Armin Frey that I found on the PEAR bug page for this problem explains what's going on and offers a solution:

[2007-07-06 15:22 UTC] arminf (Armin Frey)

It seems that the Recipients decides where to send the e-mail and the
headers decide how to display it.

The simple solution is that you add all the addresses to $recipients.

Here is the code I used:

$to = '[email protected]';
$cc = '[email protected]';
$recipients = $to.", ".$cc;
$headers['From']    = '[email protected]';
$headers['To']      = $to;
$headers['Subject'] = 'Test message';
$headers['Cc']	    = '[email protected]';
$headers['Reply-To'] = '[email protected]';

$send = $mail->send($recipients, $headers, $body);

The solution works perfectly. Now the email addresses show up in the correct fields and all the recipients receive the email. Unfortunately, this method does not work for BCCing users. I wonder if BCCing is even possible with PEAR Mail or if I'll need to find something else. To Blind CC (aka, BCC) an address, simply add the address to the $recipients, but not to any of the $headers (thanks Jason!).

A friend was having trouble with the photo-captcha mod he installed in phpBB. The photo-captcha mod basically presents users with a group of images and asks them to choose all images that fit a certain category (i.e., choose all cars). After installing the mod however (and fixing a couple of silly mistakes), only half of the images would show up. And it wasn't the same images not showing up, it was entirely random.

As is usually the case with debugging, I looked for a working example with which I could compare the non-working one. When I found a working photo-captcha mod, I noticed the images loaded more slowly and consistently than on the non-working example. It was as if the non-working example was on crack, while the working example was practicing yoga.

I compared HTTP headers, checked cache settings, and everything else I could think of, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. So I decided to try something. Why not force the mod to pause between loading each image?

So I opened /forum/includes/usercp_confirm.php and modified it:

$image = $sub;
@imagegammacorrect($image, 1.0, (0.5 + mt_rand(0,1200)*0.001));

header('Content-Type: image/jpg');
header('Cache-control: no-cache, no-store');
@imagepng($image);
// -------- EDIT BY RAAM --------
sleep(1);
// -------- END EDIT ---------
exit;

And it worked! The code paused for 1 second between loading each image and all the images loaded properly. I have no idea what caused this problem but if you know please leave a comment! And if you're having this same issue, at least now you have a solution. 🙂

For the past two years or so, I've been slowly working on a website called SaveNotes.com. However, while reading LifeHacker I came across a site called NoteSake.com. Apparently, they beat me to the punchline.

Their site looks great and has very similar features as what I had planned for SaveNotes.com. There are a couple of things I planned on doing differently, such as the ability to quickly create a note without logging in or authenticating yourself, but there were a lot of things I hadn't even thought of, such as the ability to export notes as a PDF or share notes with other NoteSake users.

I tried creating an account on NoteSake.com to try out the features, however I'm still waiting for the email that contains the confirmation URL (which is another reason I disliked the idea of requiring an account).

Perhaps I will continue to develop SaveNotes.com simply because it would be a tool I would find very useful. Besides, NoteSake.com doesn't really have any competition. Yet. 🙂

During the past week, I've been working on a small PHP application that a friend paid me to write, called SearchCSV2MySQL. He is exporting data from a specific program and saving the data in Excel as *.csv. Here is what a sample of the data looks like:

130072690978,Jan-31 09:09,4.95,$,1,Vintage McMurdo SILVER Television Pre-Amplifier
220073351918,Jan-25 19:48,"1,031.00",$,2,"PITNEY BOWES, TABLETOP INSERTING MAILING SYSTEM"

As you might have guessed, you're looking at eBay auction information. The fields in the exported data are item, date, price, currency, bid count, and description. Importing large amounts of CSV data into a MySQL database is one thing (and I'll write a follow up post detailing how the application works), but I also needed to remove unwanted fields before importing the data into MySQL.

To do this, I break up each line using $fields = explode(",", $lines[$y]);, where $y is the current line we're processing. This takes the data between the commas and puts it into the $fields array. However if you look at the sample exported data carefully, you may realize that we won't get the results we're expecting. The commas found between the double quotes, in the price and description fields, will be processed as field separators! This would cause $fields[2] (the price field) for the second line to contain "1" instead of "1,031.00".

So how did I resolve this? After looking over the syntax for strpos(), substr(), and substr_replace() a million times, I finally came up with this solution:

/*
* ***************** Remove all commas from the price field ******************
*/
/* Isolate the second field (price field) by finding the position
* of the comma right before the price field (second comma)
*/
$first_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",");
$second_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $first_comma_pos + 1);

/* Check if the price field contains double quotes,
* which would mean the price has a comma in it and we need to remove it
*/
if(substr($lines[$y], $second_comma_pos + 1, 1) == """){
/* Find the positions of the opening and closing double quotes around the price */
$price_quotes_pos_start = strpos($lines[$y], """);
$price_quotes_pos_end = strpos($lines[$y], """, $price_quotes_pos_start + 1);

/* Find all occurences of a comma after the opening double quote, but before the closing quote,
* around the price field and remove them from this line.
*/
$price_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $price_quotes_pos_start);
while($price_comma_pos < $price_quotes_pos_end){
$lines[$y] = substr_replace($lines[$y], "", $price_comma_pos, 1);
$price_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $price_quotes_pos_start);

/* Update the position of $price_quotes_pos_end,
* since it has changed after we removed a comma!
*/
$price_quotes_pos_end = strpos($lines[$y], """, $price_quotes_pos_start + 1);
}
}

/*
* ***************** Remove all commas from the description field ******************
*/
/* Find the position of the comma right before the description field (fourth comma) */
$first_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",");
$second_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $first_comma_pos + 1);
$third_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $second_comma_pos + 1);
$fourth_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $third_comma_pos + 1);
$fifth_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $fourth_comma_pos + 1);

/* Check if the description field contains double quotes,
* which would mean the description has a comma in it and we need to remove it
*/
if(substr($lines[$y], $fifth_comma_pos + 1, 1) == """){
/* Find the positions of the opening and closing double quotes around the description */
$desc_quotes_pos_start = strpos($lines[$y], """, $fifth_comma_pos);
$desc_quotes_pos_end = strpos($lines[$y], """, $desc_quotes_pos_start + 1);

/* Find all occurences of a comma after the opening double quote, but before the closing quote,
* around the description field and remove them from this line.
* Since this is the last field, we dont need to worry about finding any
* commas after the closing quote, and therefore don't need to update $desc_quotes_pos_end.
*/
while($desc_comma_pos = strpos($lines[$y], ",", $desc_quotes_pos_start)){
$lines[$y] = substr_replace($lines[$y], "", $desc_comma_pos, 1);
}
}

I realize that there are a couple of limitations to this code, such as not removing both commas if the price contains a larger number (i.e., "1,042,240.00"). It also doesn't look in the description field for commas. UPDATE: I've updated the code to remove all commas from both the price and description fields.

This code is simply a proof-of-concept to show how I solved a problem. If you know of a better way to go about this, please let me know! Hopefully posting this snippet will save someone the time I spent figuring it out.