Programmed Under The Influence

Replacing Placeholders in PHP

Ran across a neat little function in PHP for replacing multiple placeholder instances within a string.
Here’s an example:


$string = "<strong>##title##</strong><p>##some_text##</p>";

Here’s the PHP:


echo strtr($string,
  array(
    '##title##' => "The Spice...",
    '##some_text##' => "Will flow!!!"
  )
);

Here’s the result:
The Spice…

Will flow!!!

Converting Non-English Characters in PHP

In my previous post, Removing Non-English Characters in PHP, I provided a way to remove non-english characters, but I found another neat trick to convert these characters into a close ASCII equivalent. Here’s the code:

function unaccent($string) {
    if (strpos($string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), '&') !== false) {
        $string = html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', $string), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    }

    return $string;
}

…and here’s the source.

Removing Non-English Characters in PHP

Why would you want to do this, you say?

Well, I found out the other day a payment processor we use (Authorize.net) at the company I work at doesn’t allow for non-english characters and in return, throws a cryptic error.

Here’s the error:
E00003 - Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 15, position 54.

Here’s the trick:
$str = preg_replace('/[^\00-\255]+/u', '', $str);

…and here’s my sources and #2.

I am currently a student at the University of Washington working on a B.S. in Computing and Software System. I also work as a web programmer at a small company called Efellemedia.

I grew up in Tacoma, but currently live in the beautiful city of Seattle. I enjoy listening to music, drinking coffee, and programming. Now if that's not proof I live in Seattle, I don't know what is.

I originally graduated University of Washington with a B.S. in Botany at the end of 2004. From there I tried for months to get a job in the plant science field and finally landed a job at Molbak's, which is a large gardening store in Woodinville. I was the landscaper there for about a year. It wasn't a bad job cause I got to be outside all day and I was the fittest I have ever been in my entire life.

Eventually I decided I wasn't satisfied with my current position and wanted to make my hobby of programming a full time career. So here I am. On my computer all day, drinking coffee, and listening to good music.

Programming Under The Influence was a name I came up with a few days ago, because I was programming under the influence of some pain medicine, which I had taken to get rid of a headache. I felt really good, my headache was gone, and I got a lot of work done that day. Therefore, I decided to make this a personal blog of existing site mentions, my upcoming sites, and cool tricks I found along the way. And no, Percocet is *not* a trick to creating cool sites. It's good for headaches though :p.

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