PHP

This page will be a collection of resources on PHP programming.

PHP and HTML

• In modern, UTF-8 encoded XHTML pages, use the PHP function htmlspecialchars to convert a string to a HTML compatible representation. Don't use htmlentities, which would also convert accents, and other stuff that does not need to be converted when using UTF-8. Similarly, use htmlspecialchars_decode.

Libraries

• Regular Expressions in PHP

Documenting a PHP Project: PhpDocumentor

PhpDocumentor is the equivalent of Javadoc for the PHP language.

• Installation under Gentoo:
  • You can use the ebuild in Portage. However the /usr/bin/pear script is broken and must be fixed else you won't be able to emerge PhpDocumentor. In this script the PHP interpreter is called with a memory_limit argument. Thus it won't use the default memory_limit set in the /etc/php/cli-php5/php.ini file. The memory_limit argument provided in /usr/bin/pear is too low (16M), thus you have to remove it. I consider this a Gentoo/PEAR bug.
  • Be sure to emerge at least PhpDocumentor 1.3.0 (currently in testing as of March 2007), as the RC versions are not stable enough.

• Usage:
  • Just document your source code using the standard PhpDocumentor tags (which are very similar to the Javadoc ones).
  • You can also use *some* HTML tags in your PhpDocumentor docblocks. A list is available here with their meanings here.

• Compiling the source to an output format:
  • Several outputs (HTML, HTML with frames, PDF...) are available. And for each of these outputs, several templates (controlling the style - CSS - and the display of the generated documentation) are available. Some are much better than other. I recommend using the HTML:Smarty:HandS one, which can result in the following shell command:

    phpdoc -d source_dir -t output_dir -o HTML:Smarty:HandS --title "This is the general title."

  • Other good templates include HTML:Smarty:PHP, HTML:frames:phpdoc.de or HTML:frames:l0l33t. Note that you can also generate the documentation from a PHP script running on the web server, but I think it is more convenient to use the command line tool.

• Problems or things I'd like to change:
  • Currently I don't know how to remove line numbers from the generated documentation, although I would prefer not to include them.
  • I don't know how to tell PhpDocumentor that it is supposed to generate UTF-8 pages.