Archive for category TechMunchies

Using Regular Expressions with Twitter Search

Posted by Johnny in Design, PHP, Tech, TechMunchies on July 1, 2009

A new project has me using Twitter’s search api.
The json returns text of each message, which is to be expected, but many posts have “@soandso” or “http://is.gd/lko6g” or something, and that kind of info can’t just be left to sit there now can it?

No it can not.

However, a little regular expression magic and presto! Links GAlore.

Using preg_replace you can quickly and easily replace each text version of ‘@johnmangino’ with @johnmangino.
The only “trick” here is to use the parenthesis to give you a reference that will allow you to make the user link without the ‘@’.

Here is a quick function used within the loop to href the links.
Import the function and run the text through it like so:

$text = $r->text;
$text = makeRich($text);

Hope you enjoy.

Yours truly,
$johnny

, , , , ,

No Comments

SELECTing From Multiple Tables in MySQL

Posted by Johnny in Design, PHP, Tech, TechMunchies on June 6, 2009

I needed to grab data from 3 tables in one query for a new app that is being built internally at work.
I was going through the tedious procss of a multiple table JOIN when I discovered I could greatly simplify things with this –

So I thought I would share.

I know the ‘if condition is wonky.
Technically I usually do: 

$results=$mysql->query($q);
if($results)
{
 ...
}

but this seems faster to me.
No?

, ,

2 Comments

PHP, Email and Twitter – updated

Posted by Johnny in Design, PHP, Tech, TechMunchies on June 3, 2009

Update: The entire script is available at Snipt for your viewing pleasure.

Whenever we release a new Course at work an email is sent to all of the offices with all of the pertinent information including a link to the product page.

Looking for a way to keep people up-to-date on our releases through Twitter I decided the quickest, easiest and most hands-off way to do that would be to have a script that could take the email and extract the course name and a link to the product page and post it to twitter. This way we can keep people informed of the latest releases at the exact same time it’s being released.

So, I had three goals for this script.
1 – Grab the Subject and the product page link from the email.
2 – Shorten the product page link.
3 – Post the info to VTC’s twitter account

There’s nothing groundbreaking here. It’s basically reading a file with STDIN instead of a static file or webservice. But I thought I would share.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , ,

No Comments

New TechMunchies – Episode 4 PHP register_globals

Posted by Johnny in PHP, TechMunchies on December 29, 2008

techmunchep004

I’ve run into this problem for people quite a few time. Seems there are many broken scripts out there thanks to register_globals. Here is a brief explanation of what happens and why it had to change.

Still working the kinks out of this site, not digging the theme at all, but the videos are getting better. Need a decent open.
Well, enjoy!

, ,

No Comments