Let’s say you have a problem: A recent DB migration has escaped a lot of quote marks within your fields and now your app is acting funny. Your task is to fix the problem, and do it FAST. Enter the replace() function in MySQL (assumed other RDBMs as well, such as Postgres and MSSQL) UPDATE …
Category Archives: Tips
What’s your Fortune?
Here’s a fun little thing you can do for your next site goodie: display your users’ “fortunes” from the command-line interface, CLI, application Fortune. On Fedora, install: % sudo yum install fortune-mod from PHP (fortune.php) <pre> <? passthru(‘fortune’); ?> </pre> I pre-formatted the text because it comes out looking as it does in the CLI. …
Fixing Zen Cart’s Tax Miscalculation When Using a Coupon
I was recently alerted to an error in Zen Cart by a client where the tax was being miscalculated when using a coupon. Here’s the fix. Around line 240 in /store/includes/modules/order_total/ot_coupon.php Remove these lines: //$od_amount[$tax_desc] += (($products[$j][‘final_price’] * $products[$j][‘quantity’]) * $tax_rate)/100 * $ratio; //$od_amount[$tax_desc] += round(((($products[$j][‘final_price’] * $products[$j][‘quantity’]) * $tax_rate) + .5)/100 * $ratio, 2); …
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Clean file names using PHP preg_replace
It’s always a good idea to protect yourself from all sorts of possible malicious attempts by users (or even mistakes by misinformed users). Here we look at taking a string of text (a filename) containing characters that are generally speaking unsafe. Here’s a simple way to clean-up filenames (or other text input) using PHP – …
Cool Exposé trick in Mac OS X
When pressing F10 (or Ctrl-F10) to show a program’s open windows, you can press Cmd-Tab to cycle through all running apps, showing the icons across the screen as the normal Cmd-Tab does. You can also scroll through running apps in Exposé by pressing Cmd-` (back tick), but without the icons. Apparently this will also switch …