Respect is not the first PHP validation class to hit the tubes [...]]]>

All developers have had to, and one time or another, write a validation class. Over the years, I’ve personally tweaked my own validation class and it has become a pretty standard part of all my coding project; However that may all change now.

Respect is not the first PHP validation class to hit the tubes of the Net but it does appear to be one of the better implemented and flexible ones out there.

More powerful Validation from Respect – http://pulsene.ws/1atzk

Posted via email from shocm

It was a multiple part article so this is going to be kind of long but really filled with a lot of great information.

If you’re a developer working on a [...]]]> This is a great article that shows you how to really harness some of the power of VIM. I snagged it from Builder.com.

It was a multiple part article so this is going to be kind of long but really filled with a lot of great information.

If you’re a developer working on a UNIX/Linux platform, you’ve already encountered vi. Vi users fall into one of two categories: those who hate it and continually curse its finger-twisting key combinations and hard-to-remember commands, and those who love the flexibility and power it offers. For a long time, I was in the former category. However, continuous usage has led to a gradual appreciation for the speed and power under the cryptic interface, and I’ve since learnt a bunch of shortcuts and key combinations that ease the task of writing code in the editor. This article discusses my personal top ten features. Before proceeding, ensure that you have a copy of ViM (that’s Vi iMproved) installed and working on your system. You can download both binaries and sources from vim.org.

Automatic indenting

Let’s start with the basics: making your code readable. Most of the time, you do this through the careful use of indentation around nested code blocks (and, of course, lots of comments!). ViM isn’t smart enough to write the comments for you, but it can certainly help with the indenting through its very powerful auto-indenting feature.

To control the indenting of your code, there are two important variables in ViM: tabstop and autoindent . The first one controls the number of spaces a <tab> represents. If you want a <tab> to equal two spaces, you can use this command (executed from within vi):

:set tabstop=2

Now, every time you press the <tab> key for an indent, ViM will move the cursor forward two spaces.

You can also have ViM automatically indent your code blocks for you, so that you never (well, almost never) need to manually hit the <tab> key. To do this, turn on auto-indenting:

:set autoindent

With this option turned on, ViM will automatically tab a new line to the same indenting level used by the previous line. If you’re starting a loop, a conditional block or any other nested structure, this ensures that each line of code is correctly indented and in sync with the lines above it.

You won’t usually regret turning this feature on, but if you ever find it annoying—say, you switch from writing a script to writing a letter and a <tab> no longer indicates the beginning of a code block—you can turn it off with this command:

:set noautoindent

Syntax highlighting

You know how all those Windows editors can color-code your scripts so that they look pretty? Well, ViM can do that too; the editor comes with a very powerful syntax-highlighting module that supports most common programming languages such as Perl, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, XML, and JSP.

To activate syntax highlighting on your script, type:

:syntax enable

ViM automatically detects the file type and loads the appropriate set of colors. To turn syntax highlighting off (because it can sometimes cause things to slow down), use:

:syntax off

If the colors are not to your liking, you can change them to something more suitable. ViM has a ready-made solution for you here too—a number of custom color schemes ship with the distribution, and you can activate any of them with the colorscheme command, like this:

:colorscheme elflord

For a complete list of available schemes, look in the colors/ directory of the ViM shared areas (personally, I like pablo , elflord and the interestingly-named peachpuff the most).

Reading linked files

Like most programmers, you probably make it a point to create reusable code libraries that are abstracted out of your main scripts and brought in where needed through include() or require() statements. But what happens when you open up a script you wrote a few months back, and have no idea what all the include() s at the top refer to?

With ViM, finding out is a snap. If, for example, you have the following line of code at the top of your script:

#include <mydefs.h>

And, you want to look inside mydefs.h to see what it contains, simply place your ViM cursor under the filename and type:

gf

ViM will search for the file in the search path (set via the path variable) and display the file in the window immediately. This capability is a very useful one, especially when dealing with applications that have a large code tree and many internal links.

Exploring the file system

Speaking of files, ViM comes with a powerful file explorer that significantly eases the task of finding and opening files for editing. To see how it works, type:

:edit .

in the ViM editor, and watch as a file listing for the current directory is generated for you. This file listing is part of a basic but fully-functional file manager that is built in to ViM, and it’s great for quickly finding and opening a file in another directory on the file system (especially if you’re not completely sure of the exact file name).

Once the file manager has popped up, you can use the arrow keys to navigate between files and directories, and select a file for editing with the [Enter] key. While in the file explorer, use the “i” key shortcut to toggle display of file timestamps and dates…very useful if you’re looking for the most recently-edited file.

Using line numbers

Often, the error messages generated by your scripts include line numbers indicating the source of the error. By default, however, ViM does not automatically print line numbers next to each line in edit mode. To fix this, use:

:set number

command to have ViM prefix a line number before each line in the file. I have found this feature most useful when testing and debugging code simultaneously on two consoles; it’s very handy to quickly jump to “bad” lines of code.

To find out which line you’re currently editing in a file, type <CTRL>-g and look at the status bar. ViM prints a message containing statistics on the total number of lines in the file, as well as the current line number.

Even with line numbers on, you can save your <page up> and <page down> keys a bit of wear and tear by using ViM’s built-in key shortcuts to quickly jump to specific lines of your script:

• To jump to a particular line, type the line number then <SHIFT>-g . For example, to jump to line 26, type 26<SHIFT>-g .
• To jump to the beginning of the file, type gg .
• To jump to the end of the file, use <SHIFT>-g .

To turn off line number display, use:

:set nonumber

And things will go back to normal.

Multiple-window editing

When you’re writing code, it’s common to switch back and forth between multiple files, either for reference or to copy/paste lines of code. On the Windows platform, this is simple—as the name suggests, all you need to do is open multiple windows and work on them simultaneously.
But what happens in a UNIX console? Like all the best text editors, ViM supports viewing and editing files in different windows.
To see how this works, simply type

:split

from inside vi and watch as your window subdivides horizontally into two. Each subwindow will display the contents of the selected file, and you can move around independently in each one. To move from one window to the other, type

<CTRL>-w-w.

To open a new blank window, type

:new

Instead of having the same file appear in each window, you can tell ViM to open a different file in the new window by adding the file path and name after the split command, as below:

:split /tmp/test.c

The cut, copy, and paste commands—d, y, and p—work as usual and can be used to move text from one window to another. If your console and ViM build support “visual mode,” you can even “select” blocks of text and “drag and drop” them between windows.

First, get your web administrator to enable your use of .htaccess files. This requires a stanza in ServerRoot/conf/access.conf like this:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

where /home/webber is replaced [...]]]> Just a good step by step on how to configure Apache to use a .htaccess file. I rarely ever use this method except in testing so I always forget.

First, get your web administrator to enable your use of .htaccess files. This requires a stanza in ServerRoot/conf/access.conf like this:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

where /home/webber is replaced by your home directory. Without this, the usual default is AllowOverride None, which means that .htaccess files are ignored. The above stanza allows .htaccess control in all subdirectories of the specified Directory.

Set up a reasonably secure directory for the password (and optionally the group) files. This directory should not be in the web document tree! If it is, someone who can learn or guess the URL of the password file can fetch it and try to crack the passwords. (This refers to visitors from elsewhere on the Internet. There is no simple way to prevent users with accounts on the web server host itself from snooping in the password file, so we will have to settle for security by obscurity and trust them not to try too hard.)
Let us name this directory http-etc by analogy to the Unix /etc directory where the system passwd and group files reside. Place it in your home directory (not in public_html) so that it is outside URL space. Give it permission 701 = rwx—–x meaning you the owner can do anything, and the web server, running as the ordinary user apache, can access the directory but cannot list it (so it must know the file names in advance).1

In the http-etc directory, create the password file. It can have any name. A usual choice is htpasswd. Give it permission 644 = rw-r–r–. This file can be created empty by the touch command, or created with one initial entry by using the -c option when you run the htpasswd command the first time.

Add users to the password file using the htpasswd command. From your home directory, the command would be something like:
htpasswd http-etc/htpasswd guest

In this example, the htpasswd program will prompt you for the password for user guest. After you type the password, you will have to re-type it for verification. The format of the password file is like this:

guest:IA22a/FU48faw
janeuser:kyxFwALyFbsPw
joeuser:rjyJsqbtXCvXo

The gibberish after each user’s name is the encrypted password. The plaintext passwords are not stored, for obvious security reasons. You cannot edit this file to change the passwords, unless you are the kind of person the NSA is very interested in hiring. The only way to update it is with the htpasswd program.

If you want to organize your users into groups, create a groups file, in the same directory as the password file. Its usual name is htgroup. Give it the same permissions as the password file. It contains a list of group names, with each group name followed by the user names belonging to the group. Create it using any text editor. The format is like:
guest: guest
users: janeuser joeuser

In any directory in your web page area that is to be protected, create a file named .htaccess, with contents like this:
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Restricted Directory”
AuthUserFile /home/webber/http-etc/htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /home/webber/http-etc/htgroup
Require group users guest

Alternatively the require directive can say:
Require user guest joeuser

or
Require valid-user

TAR is the Unix Tape ARchive utility. It can be used to either store data on a streaming tape device like a DAT drive, or store files in what is commonly called a tarball [...]]]> [NOTE]
I don’t remember where I got this article from but it is full of some good information
[/NOTE]

TAR is the Unix Tape ARchive utility. It can be used to either store data on a streaming tape device like a DAT drive, or store files in what is commonly called a tarball file- somewhat like a pkzip file, only compression is optional.

[The basics]

In these examples, I will use the following file structure: a top level directory called DIR1 containing the files picture.jpg, document.doc and database.db.

DIR1/
DIR1/picture.jpg
DIR1/document.doc
DIR1/database.db

[Creating a tarball]

If we were in the directory DIR1 and wanted to backup all the files to a tarball called backup.tar, we could issue this command:

$ tar cvf backup.tar .
./
picture.jpg
doucment.doc
database.db
tar: backup.tar is the archive; not dumped

Note:
c=create (an archive)
v=verbose (just because)
f=filename (the name of our tarball)
.=current directory (what’s going to be backed up)

Also worth mentioning is that by default tar is recursive- meaning it will back up all files and subdirectories recursively unless you otherwise specify with the n flag (non-recursive)

[Displaying the Contents of a Tarball]

The current directory will now contain a file called backup.tar. To display the contents of the tarball file, we could issue this command:

$ tar tvf backup.tar
drwxr-xr-x root/gci 0 Jun 29 10:10 ./
-rw-r–r– root/gci 1 Jun 29 10:10 picture.jpg
-rw-r–r– root/gci 1 Jun 29 10:10 document.doc
-rw-r–r– root/gci 1 Jun 29 10:10 databse.db

Note:
t=table of contents (list)
v=verbose (display all info)
f=filename (backup.tar)

[Extracting Data from a Tarball]
To extract the entire contents of the tarball to the current directory, we can type:
$ tar xvf backup.tar
./
picture.jpg
doucment.doc
database.db

Note:
x=extract
v=verbose
f=filename (backup.tar)

To extract only the picture.jpg file from the archive, type the following command:

$ tar xvf backup.tar picture.jpg

Alternatively, you can use wild cards in either the creation or extraction of a tarball. To extract all jpg files from our archive, we can use a command like this:

$ tar xvf backup.tar *.jpg

[Using Compression]

If you would also like to add compression to your tarballs, you can combine the gzip utility with tar on the command line by adding the z switch to the command. Usually when this is done, we change the suffix of our tarball filename from .tar to either .tgz or .tar.gz. This will let whoever sees the file know that it is a gzipped tarball.

$ tar zcvf tarball.tgz .

Note:
z=gzip compression
c=create
v=verbose
f=filename (backup.tgz)
.=current directory (what to backup)

[Permissions with tar]

If you would like to preserve the permissions of the files you backup, use the p option with the tar command. This will save the uid, gid as well as the specific permission attributes of the files (read, write, execute etc.)

$ tar pzcvf tarball.tgz .

You should also use the p option with the tar extraction command:

$ tar pxvf tarball.tgz .

This site I’m working on relies heavily on user input through forms, and all that data needs to be checked before being sent a database. I knew PHP3′s regular expression functions should solve my problem, but I didn’t know how to form the regular expressions in the first place. What I [...]]]> Dario F. Gomes

This site I’m working on relies heavily on user input through forms, and all that data needs to be checked before being sent a database. I knew PHP3′s regular expression functions should solve my problem, but I didn’t know how to form the regular expressions in the first place. What I needed were some sample strings–obviously the first places I looked were the PHP3 manual and the POSIX 1002.3 specification, but they don’t help much in the way of exemplifying.
Adding to that, I had a really hard time finding good literature on the Web about the subject. I eventually got to know how to do it, mostly through experimenting, and seeing there wasn’t much to it, I decided to write down this straight-out introduction to the syntax and a step-by-step on building regular expressions to validate money and e-mail address strings. I just hope it manages to clear the fog around the subject for all you fellow programmers.

Basic Syntax of Regular Expressions

First of all, let’s take a look at two special symbols: ‘^’ and ‘$’. What they do is indicate the start and the end of a string, respectively, like this:

• “^The“: matches any string that starts with
  “The”;

• “of despair$“: matches a string that ends in the
  substring “of despair”;

• “^abc$“: a string that starts and ends with “abc”
  — that could only be “abc” itself!

• “notice“: a string that has the text “notice”
  in it.

you don’t use either of the two characters we mentioned, as in the last example, you’re saying that the pattern may occur anywhere inside the string — you’re not “hooking” it to any of the edges.

There are also the symbols ‘*’, ‘+’, and ‘?’, which denote the number of times a character or a sequence of characters may occur. What they mean is:
“zero or more”, “one or more”, and “zero or one.”

Here are some examples:

• “ab*“: matches a string that has an a followed
  by zero or more b‘s (“a”, “ab”, “abbb”,
  etc.);

• “ab+“: same, but there’s at least one b (“ab”,
  “abbb”, etc.);

• “ab?“: there might be a b or not;
• “a?b+$“: a possible a followed by one or more b‘s ending a string.

>bounds, which come inside braces and indicateranges in the number of occurences:

• “ab{2}“: matches a string that has an a followed
  by exactly two b‘s (“abb”);

• “ab{2,}“: there are at least two b‘s (“abb”,
  “abbbb”, etc.);

• “ab{3,5}“: from three to five b‘s (“abbb”,
  “abbbb”, or “abbbbb”).