Apostolos Dountsis

PHP is a simple and yet very powerful high-level computer language that it is designed for creating dynamic pages and applications on the web. It is very well documented on the official web site and as it becomes obvious from browsing the Functions Reference on the online manual, PHP has a great API.

However, everytime I begin a new project either for a client or for personal experimentation, I end up in need of a set of general-purpose fuctions that are not included in PHP. I tend to put these functions in a file named common.php that I usually include in the base class of my project.

pre_print_r()

This function displays information about a variable in a way that’s readable by humans. If given a string, integer or float, the value itself will be printed. If given an array, values will be presented in a format that shows keys and elements. Similar notation is used for objects.

function pre_print_r($a)
{
print('< pre >');
print_r($a);
print('< /pre >');
}

println()

Performs a standard print() on the browser but the generated HTML source code is nicely formatted.

function println($str)
{
print($str."\n");
}

is_even()

Checks if the parameter is an even number. This is useful when you want to present data in a tabular format and you want to display every alternative row with a different background color.
function is_even($number)
{
if ($number % 2 == 0 )
{
// The number is even
return true;
}
else
{
// The number is odd
return false;
}
}

redirect()

This is a wrapper around header(). If no parameter is specified then it performs on redirect on the current page. This function is extremely useful when an insert query is executed as a result of a form submission. If the user decides to refresh the page then the query won’t be performed twice.

function redirect($location='')
{
if(empty($location))
{
header("location: {$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}”);
}
else
{
header(”location: $location”);
}
exit();
}

send_mail()

This is a wrapper function around mail(). It generates the email headers based on the function parameters.

function send_mail($from_name, $from_email, $to_name, $to_email, $subject, $message)
{
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\n";
$headers .= "X-Priority: 1\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: php\n";
$headers .= "From: "".$from_name."" <".$from_email.">\n";
if(mail(""".$to_name."" <".$to_email.">", trim($subject), trim($message), $headers))
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}

is_extant()

Checks whether the variable is empty, but allow for it to be zero.
function is_extant($var)
{
if (isset($var))
{
if( empty($var) && ($var !== 0) && ($var !== '0') )
return false;
else
return true;
}
else
return false;
}

gd_loaded()

GD is an extremely popular graphic library that is usually compiled into the PHP but it is not available out of the box. This function checks whether the GD has is available in the PHP installation or not.

function gd_loaded()
{
if (!extension_loaded('gd'))
{
if (!dl('gd.so'))
{
return false;
}
}
return true;
}

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