Tag Archives: PHP

Random Character Generation in PHP and JavaScript

Posted by on February 8, 2012 No comments

I wrote this function in response to someone else’s attempt on a forum I was asked to join. It basically generates a string of random letters and numbers with the letters being in both upper and lower case. It is easy to edit it to only use upper or lower case letters or even add symbols as well. I initially wrote it in PHP and then rewrote it in JavaScript as well.

function randomString($strLen = 32)
{
  // Create our character arrays
  $chrs = array_merge(range('a', 'z'), range('A', 'Z'), range(0, 9));
 
  // Just to make the output even more random
  shuffle($chrs);
 
  // Create a holder for our string
  $randStr = '';
 
  // Now loop through the desired number of characters for our string
  for($i=0; $i< $strLen; $i++)
  {
    $randStr .= $chrs[mt_rand(0, (count($chrs) - 1))];
  }
  return $randStr;
}

Using it is simply a case of calling it and specifying how long to make the string otherwise it uses the default length of 32 characters.

echo randomString(12);

To also make it use symbols you just change the array_merge to
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Sending email via SMTP using PHP

Posted by on October 24, 2011 No comments

A couple of my users contacted me to say that their host had disabled sendmail and required any scripts they use to now use SMTP to send emails. This resulted in me quickly reading all I could about SMTP and the result is this slightly rough script I am sharing. It’s pretty self explanatory. Put your SMTP server details in the $mailCfg array. Next simply call the smtpMail function which uses the same variables as the standard PHP mail() function but with two additional variables. The additional variables are the email address we are sending from and $mailCfg. I could of put $mailCfg as a global but this way you can include the script in a different script and store the required information where ever you want. The from address is important as most SMTP servers will reject the message if it’s not included.

Just remember the code is far from perfect and was created to do a simple job.

It also has one nice extra function you might find useful… Read more »

Gzipping your pages to save bandwidth

Posted by on February 13, 2009 1 comment

Ok I’ve been playing with Javascript frameworks like Jquery and Prototype. Now by default Jquery is 54KB and Prototype is 130KB (at the time of writing this). As you can see these are not small files. Now this is where gzip comes in. An easy way to describe gzip is that your server zips up the file before sending it to the web browser and the web browser then unzips it. Anyway by gzipping these two files using some PHP I have got Jquery down to 19KB and prototype down to 30KB!!!!

So we have Jquery:
Original Size: 54 KB
Gzipped Size: 19 KB
Data Savings: 64.81%

and prototype:
Original Size: 131 KB
Gzipped Size: 30 KB
Data Savings: 77.1%

All testing done using mod_zip test.

Anyway on to the code.
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Using The PHP mail Function

Posted by on January 29, 2008 No comments

Ok been a while since I posted anything so thought I would post my tutorial on using the PHP mail() function. I have basically copied my tutorial word for word from the Lazarus forum.

This is a brief (or not) tutorial on using the PHP mail() function to send emails from your scripts.

bool mail ( string $to , string $subject , string $message [, string $additional_headers [, string $additional_parameters ]] )

Let’s break that down. The bool means that the PHP mail function returns either true or false depending on if it was successful or not. The rest is pretty self explanatory. string $to is where we put the email address we want to send to. string $subject is where we put the emails subject and string $message is where we put our message. The string part just means that this variable will be treated as a string when used. We will cover $additional_headers a bit later and won’t even touch on $additional_parameters.

Ok so we want to send an email to Bill Gates with the subject Windows Linux and our message is When is it coming out?. The function we would use looks like this

<?php
mail(‘[email protected]’, ‘Windows Linux’, ‘When is it coming out?’);
?>

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