That way is via filter_var() php function which does the things 10 times faster :

<?php
$email = "someone@example.com";

if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
echo "Invalid email address";
}
?>

To run such a script you must have GD library installed. We’ll take parametres via GET and merge into image:

<?php

if(!isset($_GET['text']))
{
die("No text provided");
}
header ("Content-type: image/png");
$textToConvert = $_GET['text'];
$font   = 4;
$width  = ImageFontWidth($font) * strlen($textToConvert);
$height = ImageFontHeight($font);
$im = @imagecreate ($width,$height);
$background_color = imagecolorallocate ($im, 255, 255, 255); //this means it's white bg
$text_color = imagecolorallocate ($im, 0, 0,0);//and of course black text
imagestring ($im, $font, 0, 0,  $textToConvert, $text_color);
imagepng ($im);
?>

Save this as textToImage.php and then when you want to create the image and read text do it like :

<img src="textToImage.php?text=emailAddress@emailProvider.com">

<?php
print $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
?>

And for all the features of browser user :

<?php
print_r(get_browser(null, true));//null for user agent &amp; true to return array

?>

Click here to get the function

And here’s how to use it for example to generate a select (drop down) with options to list countries:

<?php
$countryList = countryArray();

print "<select name=\"countryList\">";

foreach($countryList as $simbol => $country) {

print "<option value=\"$simbol\">$country</option>\n";
}

print "</select>";
?>

Simply usefull!

The list() php function will assign variables in one shot to strings from arrays.

<?php
//here's the php array

$countingArray = array(1,2,3);
//here, the list function will convert 1 to $one variable, 2 to $two and 3 to $three

list("one", "two", "three") = $countingArray;

print "I am counting $one, errr I think it comes $two, and lastly $three";
//should print I am counting 1, err....comes 2 and lastly 3

?>

<?php
$protocol = strtolower(substr($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"],0,5))=='https'?'https':'http';

print "The protocol is $protocol";
?>

Tadaaa!

Yesterday I’ve found a nice function in php called ctype. And? What it does? Well, I see it as a replacement for regular expressions. PHP Ctype function checks for character type. Let’s hear the chars type we can check with that nice function  :

• alphanumeric characters – ctype_alnum()
• alphabetic characters      – ctype_alpha()
• control characters           – ctype_cntrl()
• numeric characters         – ctype_digit()
• lowercase characters      – ctype_lower()
• uppercase characters      – ctype_upper()
• printable characters        – ctype_print()
• any printable character but not whitespace or an alphanumeric – ctype_punct()
• any printable characters but not space – ctype_graph()
• whitespace characters    – ctype_space()
• hexadecimal digit characters – ctype_xdigit()

Ok, long list huh? but usefull. I will show you a simple example which of course can be applied for all other ctype() functions :

<?php
//will check if a character type is digit

$toCheck = 1010;

if(ctype_digit($toCheck)) {

print "$toCheck is a number";
}else{

print "$toCheck is NOT a number";
}
?>

<?php

print __LINE__;
?>

This will print 3, because it’s line two!

<form action="" method="post">
name <input type="text" name="name"><br/>
email <input type="text" name="email"><br/>
<input type="submit" name="sb" id="sb" value="go">
</form>
<?php

if(isset($_POST['sb'])) {
extract($_POST);

if(empty($name) || empty($email)) die("email and name emtpy");

print "Name is $name and email is $email now!";
}
?>

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a basic rss / xml feed with php. Basically, if you know how to create a feed in notepad, wordpad or whatever text editor, this will be easy. The difference between creating a php xml / rss feed and a “normal” one it’s that you can do this feed dinamyc later, by extracting feed elements from a database such as MySQL.

<?php
$XMLoutput = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>
<rss version=\"2.0\">
<channel>
<title>PHP RSS XML FEED</title>
<link>http://www.exampledomain.com/RSS-XML-FEED.php</link>
<description>RSS Feed Description</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate>dd/mm/yy</pubDate>
<lastBuildDate>dd/mm/yy</lastBuildDate>
";
$XMLoutput .= " <item>
<title>A title here</title>
<link>Some link here</link>
<description>description goes here</description>
</item>";
$XMLoutput .= "</channel></rss>";
header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml");
print $XMLoutput;
?>