PDF DOC XLS ODF from PHP?
Zdenek Machek | 01 September 2011
Every PHP developer will sooner or later face a request to output a document as a PDF, XLS, DOC or ODF. Exporting each format by hand is as time consuming as it is dull - especially things like point-by-point positioning of elements in a PDF. So how can we get around this tedious chore using PHP?
Writing MySQL functions in C
Andreas Jansson | 15 December 2010
In the previous post Zdenek explained how to use MySQL stored functions to calculate the distance between two points on the lat/lng plane. Here I take his function as a starting point to describe how to implement user defined functions written in C, and import them into MySQL.
User defined functions (UDF) are compiled C functions that you can use as normal functions within MySQL. UDFs have a number of advantages over stored functions written using SQL, the most important being improved performance and the fact that you can use them as aggregate functions (like you can with SUM(), AVG(), etc.).
Writing UDFs is easy. So is compiling and importing UDFs into MySQL. First you need to do a little bit of setting up. This is how you do it (in Ubuntu and Red Hat).
Automatic geolocation and SQL
Zdenek Machek | 16 November 2010
Recently we launched a website and platform for iGo Gift Vouchers. One of the screens shows an interactive list of the shops where vouchers can be used. The classic interface design pattern for this is to ask users to provide a postcode, or the name of a city or town, and then display the shops in that area on a map.
As usual, we decided to try something new and improve a little on the traditional functionality. We wanted to automatically detect where the user is right now, so we can display shops in their area as soon as they arrive on the page, without them having to enter any information. You can see how it works at www.igogiftvouchers.co.uk/myigo - when your browser asks if you would like to share your location with the page, just click the option to accept.
So why Geolocation and SQL? The first part of this task, identifying where the user is, is handled on the client side usining JavaScript. But SQL comes in as the best and fastest tool for the second part of the task: identifying which shops are nearest and should be displayed on the map.
PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet
Nick Nettleton | 03 July 2006
When we started building DropSend, we decided to support all languages worldwide from the start. The interface is currently in English only, but the application can send, store, sort and process your data whatever language you want. As a result, we have a good number of customers out east.
To support worldwide languages, you need to use UTF-8 encoding for your web pages, emails and application, rather than ISO 8859-1 or another common western encoding, since these don't support characters used in languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
Happily, UTF-8 is transparent to the core Latin characterset, so you won't need to convert all your data to start using UTF-8. But there are a number of other issues to deal with. In particular, because UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding, meaning one character can be represented by more one or more bytes. This causes trouble for PHP, because the language parses and processes strings based on bytes, not characters, and makes mincemeat multibyte strings - for example, by splitting characters 'in half', bodging up regular expressions, and rendering email unreadable.
There are a number of great articles online about UTF-8 and how it works - Joel Spolski's comes to mind - but very few about how to actually get it working with PHP and iron out all the bugs. So, here to save you the time we put in, is a quick cheatsheet and info about a few common issues.
