Errors give valuable information, it’s worth paying attention to.

Sometimes though when parsing content from different sources you can run into errors you can prevent, or you can’t solve.

Reading something into simpleXML that isn’t 100% validated XML, because it’s encoded in ISO-8859 instead of UTF-8.

Then use the PHP one error control operator @.

When prepended to an expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored.

Tha comes quite in hand in the following piece of code :

$xml = @simplexml_load_file('rssfeed.xml');

No more errors.

It is tempting to simply generate CSV data with writing comma-separated  array-values.

implode(",", $data_array);

Unfortunately this obvious way of doing turns out to be a bad idea. Often it seems to be working at first, but eventually you’ll be faced with annoying bugs, wrongly escaped data.

Fortunately, PHP has a native function to write CSV values to a file.

fputcsv()

With a little trick you can use this function to write values to the screen.
Use the built-in streamwrappers:

 $outstream = fopen("php://output", 'w');
 fputcsv($outstream, $data_array, ',', '"');
 fclose($outstream);

This will echo the data to the screen.
Most people won’t know `php://output`. A pity it’s really powerful.

Parsing feeds with the SimpleXML object is a walk in the park. But it can turn into a pain in the ass, when the provided XML feed isn’t correctly UTF8 encoded and I can tell you, there are some ugly ones out there in the wild.

Parsing RSS feeds with SimpleXML

Normally you can load and parse a feed as simple as:

<?
$feed = simplexml_load_file(rss.xml);

foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item){ ?>
  <h3><?= $item->title ?></h3>
  <p><?= $item->description ?></p>
<? } ?>

That’s a standard. Sometimes though the XML is not proper UTF8 encoded, and the following nasty error occurs loading in into the SimpleXML object.

Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: Entity: line 6: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xEB 0x6C 0×65 0×20 in index.php on line 33

How to fix this

First I tried to filter out the bad characters with str_replace, but that’s silly. I didn’t feel right. So I looked further and I stumbled on this quite unknow function iconv.

What’s the iconv module

This module contains an interface to iconv character set conversion facility. With this module, you can turn a string represented by a local character set into the one represented by another character set, which may be the Unicode character set. Supported character sets depend on the iconv implementation of your system.

The iconv function is available since PHP 4.0.5

Description

string iconv ( string $in_charset , string $out_charset , string $str )

Performs a character set conversion on the string str from in_charset to out_charset .

A better and safer way of parsing

To be on the safe side, never read in a feed directly into a SimpleXML object, but do it this way:

$feed = file_get_contents($feed_url);

$feed = iconv("UTF-8","UTF-8//IGNORE",$feed);

$feed = simplexml_load_string($feed);

There is another reason to do this. Reading in a feed with file_get_contents is much faster then loading it straight into a SimpleXML object , at least in PHP < 5.2x.

So following above instructions you will experience a performance gain and get rid of some nasty unexpected errors.

One of the big annoyances is having a blog or webpage in a certain language and that all the dates appear on your website in English. Of course you can choose just numbered formats, but sometimes the month or the day of the week in words adds that needed little extra polish.

Formatting a date in PHP

Normally a date is formatted like this with the date() function:

< ?= date('d-m-Y') ?>

Formatting a localised date in PHP

But to format a date in your preferred language you need to use the strftime function:

Format the time and/or date according to locale settings. Month and weekday names and other language-dependent strings respect the current locale set with setlocale().

So we also need the setlocale() function. This function let you set the language to use for the formatting. Your system or server should have them installed, otherwise it’s not possible! And most of them are not installed by default, although easily available.
What does the setlocale() function do:

Returns the new current locale, or FALSE if the locale functionality is not implemented on your platform, the specified locale does not exist or the category name is invalid.
An invalid category name also causes a warning message. Category/locale names can be found in RFC 1766 and ISO 639. Different systems have different naming schemes for locales.

Tough pages to consume to be honest, but let’s go on.

Locales settings on your server

You can find the installed localisations in this file on a Linux server:

vi var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

My server only had one line by default!
Simply add the one’s you’re missing. You can find all possible localisations in this file:

/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

Don’t add them all: it will decrease performance.

So we’re nearly done:

< ?
setlocale(LC_TIME,'nl-NL.UTF-8');
echo strftime('%s-$b-%y',time())
?>

You need to enter the correct encoding aswell, otherwise it won’t work. This is dependent of the server settings, so it will influence the portability of your code a bit.
Above code will give you the current date in Dutch, but we need another function to create localised dates from stored timestamps of the MySQL database.

Converting stored Timestamps to PHP understandable format

A MySQL timestamp value won’t work as a direct input to the strftime function. We need to convert it with another function: strtotime.

So we end up with something like this:

< ?
setlocale(LC_TIME,'nl-NL.UTF-8');
echo strftime('%A %d $b %y',strtotime($row->timestamp))
?>

Quite a long road to take for a boring date!

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9.

This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.9:

• Fixed security issue in imagerotate(), background colour isn’t validated correctly with a non truecolour image. Reported by Hamid Ebadi, APA Laboratory (Fixes CVE-2008-5498). (Scott)
• Fixed a crash on extract in zip when files or directories entry names contain a relative path. (Pierre)
• Fixed explode() behavior with empty string to respect negative limit. (Shire)
• Fixed a segfault when malformed string is passed to json_decode(). (Scott)

Further details about the PHP 5.2.9 can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.9, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.
Read more here