I Googled around but failed to find a working solution so I decided to mess around with regular expressions to add my fix.  Guess what?  I got it working.  Here’s how you can add HEREDOC syntax highlighting for PHP In Bluefish.

1. In Bluefish, click Edit -> Preferences.  Then select the Syntax Highlighting tab
2. Select “php” from the filetype dropdown
3. Type HEREDOC in “Pattern Name”.  Don’t click “Add” yet.
4. Choose “Only Start Pattern”
5. Type <<<([A-Z]+)\n.*?\n\1; in the “Start Pattern” field
6. Type ^PHP Block$ in the “Parentmatch” field
7. Type #009900 in the Foreground color field
8. Select the “force non-bold weight” and “force non-italic style” radio buttons
9. Click “Add”
10. Scroll down to the bottom, click HEREDOC and click “Up” until HEREDOC is placed just above “Operators”
11. Now, select “Operators” and change its “Start pattern” to [\+\-\*\/\.<>=`!%]+?(?!\?php)
12. Click “Apply” then click “OK”

Bluefish should now properly apply syntax highlighting to strings defined the HEREDOC way.

The mail function accepts at least three parameters namely the recipient, subject and the message. That alone will do most of what you need to do. The power however of the mail() function is in the option fourth parameter which is for adding additional headers. It accepts a string which can contain any valid email header. The second example above shows how to use the fourth header to specify the sender of the email but it can do more than that.

You can specify CC or BCC recipients in it and if you’re up for the challenge, you can use it to add attachments to your email. Yes, I know that’s tough and that really sucks knowing that other scripting languages such as ASP provide a much better and easier way to send emails.

That’s where the PHPMailer Class comes in. It’s a free PHP class that makes sending emails with PHP easier and more powerful. You can download it here and here’s how to use it.

The power of PHPMailer is more than that. Through it you can add attachments to your email, specify an HTML body for your email, etc. Download it and check out the examples they provide.

Happy emailing and please, don’t spam. :)

Say we have a page called ‘cookiepage.php’ in a particular website that checks for the cookie set by the homepage and will only return the proper output if the cookie exists. How do you do it? Here’s how…

Just in case you weren’t able to catch what we did in the above example, here’s a short explanation.

• STEP 1 creates a temporary cookie file using the tempnam() function.
• STEP 2 loads the homepage and saves the cookie in our temporary cookie file. The key here is this line:

  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $ckfile);

• STEP 3 loads cookiepage.php with the saved cookie with this line:

  curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $ckfile);

Sleek and simple ei? Hope this PHP cURL Cookie example helped you out!

And what happened? Here’s my quick explanation.

$urltopost

The url where you want to post your data to

$datatopost

The post data as an associative array. The keys are the post variables

$ch = curl_init ($urltopost);

Initializes cURL

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);

Tells cURL that we want to send post data

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $datatopost);

Tells cURL what are post data is

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

Tells cURL to return the output of the post

$returndata = curl_exec ($ch);

Executes the cURL and saves theoutput in $returndata

There ya go! If you have questions, just ask in our forum.

cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax. The strong point of cURL is the number of data transfer protocols it supports. It is distributed under the MIT License which makes cURL free software. It supports FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, SCP, SFTP, Telnet, DICT, FILE and LDAP. – based on Wikipedia’s definition

PHP cURL allows you to read websites, make automated logins, upload files and many more. I’m personally using it to automate updating of my many websites.

Now that you know what cURL is, I think it’s time to look at some code.

The simple example above simply gets the contents of www.yahoo.com and saves it in the variable $yahoo. Here’s a line-by-line explanation:

$ch = curl_init ("http://www.yahoo.com");

Initialize curl with the URL of yahoo

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

Tell php curl that we want the data returned to us instead of being displayed

$yahoo = curl_exec ($ch);

Execute curl and put the output in $yahoo.

But, that’s too simple! That can be done in simpler ways with PHP’s file functions such as file() and file_get_contents()! True but that’s where the comparison ends.

The power of PHP cURL lies within the curl_setopt() function. This function instructs cURL of what exactly we want to do. Let’s say, what if a webpage that you want to access checks for the HTTP_REFERER header? Or perhaps, what if you need to access a webpage that works correctly only if cookies are enabled?

Here’s another example… This time we specify the HTTP_REFERER…

In this example, the CURLOPT_REFERER line tells cURL to set the HTTP_REFERER header to http://www.somedomain.com/page1.php.

PHP cURL can do more. It can send POST data, it can log on to a website and automate tasks as if it was a real person and much more. That’s it for now and I hope this PHP cURL Tutorial helped you.

Without further ado, let’s go on…

The simplest way to install everything you need to run PHP web pages on your workstation is to install XAMPP. The beauty of using XAMPP is that it can be installed on any of the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows
• Linux
• Sun Solaris
• Mac OS X

As for XAMPP, it means:

• X – any of the four operating systems above
• A – Apache (the web server that serves your PHP web pages)
• M – MySQL (the SQL database)
• P – PHP
• P – Perl

It used to be called LAMPP where L stands for Linux but they decided to change L with X since it’s not just Linux anymore. So how do we install it? Simple, go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and download the correct installer for your system. To make it even easier for you, I’m including the links to the installer download pages here.

• Linux – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
• Microsoft Windows – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
• Mac OS X – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html
• Sun Solaris – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-solaris.html

To install, just download and follow installation instructions. (C’mon, you don’t expect me to spoon-feed you everything right?)

After you’ve installed XAMPP, all you need to do is run it. In Windows, all you have to do is run XAMPP Control and start each service that you want. Basically, you’ll want to start Apache and MySQL. After you’ve started Apache, you can now give it a try by browsing to http://localhost/. That should show you the XAMPP welcome page.

The XAMPP Control Panel

XAMPP Start Page (http://localhost/)

XAMPP also comes with phpMyAdmin which allows you to manage your MySQL databases via browser interface. You may access phpMyAdmin by browsing to http://localhost/phpmyadmin

phpMyAdmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin)

So where do you put your PHP pages so that they are properly served by Apache? With XAMPP, it goes in the htdocs folder of your XAMPP installation. I recommend that you create separate folders for your projects so you can easily manage them.

Now that you have Apache/PHP and MySQL running through XAMPP, the next thing for you to do is install an editor. Any plain text editor such as Notepad will do. However, there are better editors out there that provide syntax highlighting and debugging functions. One of my favorites is Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools). It runs on Java which means it is cross-platform.

Eclipse Splash Screen

The easiest way to install Eclipse PDT is to follow these simple steps:

1. Go to http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/downloads/
2. Click the Release Build
3. Download the All-in-One package for your operating system
4. Uncompress the downloaded package and run Eclipse from there

If you did it correctly, then you should see Eclipse’s IDE. Mine looks something like this:

Eclipse PDT Integrated Development Environment

One nice feature I like with Eclipse PDT is that it has a list of all the functions supported by PHP making it easier for me to write thousands of lines of code. Also, since it’s an IDE, it also keeps track of your variables, functions, and classes.

Quick but important note, it’s also best to keep a copy of the PHP manual accessible. If you’re always online, then the manual is just a click away. Typing php.net/str_replace on your browser will take you to the documentation of the PHP’s str_replace function. You may also want to download a copy of the PHP manual if you’re not connected to the internet all the time.

There you go. If you’ve successfully installed XAMPP and Eclipse then you already have the basic needs in getting started with PHP.

The Script

Since this isValidDate uses PHP’s strtotime function, it can practically accept any English textual datetime description.