Tutorials

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PHP Beginner

json_encode() Has Flags That Fix Its Worst Defaults

Escaped slashes, mangled unicode, silent failures returning false - json_encode ships with defaults from another era, and five flags fix all of it.

Nov 3, 2024 2 min 692 Read →

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PHP Beginner

"First Day of Next Month": PHP Date Phrases You Should Steal

strtotime and DateTime parse a small English grammar - "last day of next month", "second friday of january" - that replaces whole functions of calendar math.

Oct 30, 2024 2 min 3,146 Read →

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PHP Advanced

The Timing Attack Hiding in Your Token Comparison

Comparing secrets with === leaks how many leading characters matched, one microsecond at a time. hash_equals exists for exactly this, and knowing when to use it is the whole trick.

Oct 22, 2024 2 min 1,326 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

Never Trust a File Extension: Real MIME Detection in PHP

A PHP script renamed to photo.jpg sails past extension checks. finfo reads the actual bytes. Here is the upload validation layer cake that actually holds.

Oct 16, 2024 2 min 1,914 Read →

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PHP Advanced

Answer First, Work Later: Post-Response Processing in PHP

Sending the confirmation email should not make the customer stare at a spinner. PHP can close the HTTP response and keep working - if you know which runtime you are on.

Oct 9, 2024 2 min 2,578 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

Render Your Email Templates with Output Buffering

ob_start() plus include turns any PHP file into a string-returning template - the exact mechanism template engines are built on, useful raw for emails, PDFs and HTML fragments.

Oct 2, 2024 2 min 671 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

PHP's match(true) Pattern Replaces if/elseif Chains

match() is not just a stricter switch. Feed it true as the subject and every arm becomes an arbitrary condition - an elegant, exhaustive replacement for elseif ladders.

Sep 24, 2024 2 min 1,966 Read →

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PHP Beginner

array_column() Does Way More Than Grab a Column

The third parameter turns array_column into a re-indexing tool, it reads object properties, and combined with array_map it handles most of your collection reshaping.

Sep 15, 2024 2 min 1,417 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

The PDO Fetch Modes That Delete Half Your Data-Mapping Code

FETCH_KEY_PAIR, FETCH_UNIQUE, FETCH_GROUP and FETCH_COLUMN reshape query results at fetch time - the id-indexed maps and grouped arrays you keep building with foreach loops.

Sep 11, 2024 2 min 2,068 Read →

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PHP Advanced

The PHP Session Lock That's Serializing Your AJAX Calls

Fire five parallel AJAX requests at a PHP backend and watch them execute one... at... a... time. The culprit is the session file lock, and the fix is a single function call.

Sep 5, 2024 2 min 702 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

Processing a 2 GB CSV in PHP Without Running Out of Memory

file() and fetchAll() load everything into RAM and die on big datasets. Generators stream one row at a time with constant memory - and the code barely changes.

Aug 31, 2024 2 min 3,406 Read →

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CSS Beginner

gap Works in Flexbox Too (Kill Your Margin Hacks)

The lobotomized owl, :not(:last-child) margins, negative-margin wrappers - all workarounds for spacing between flex items. gap has worked in flexbox everywhere since 2021.

Aug 24, 2024 2 min 3,430 Read →