Six Useful PHP code snippets

Here’s a mini list of useful PHP code snippets that we find using on a weekly basis. You could use these as is or expand them as part of other applications or add them to a php class.

Adjust server time

Useful if you have a server in a different timezone, like us... You can fix funny things happen when you add the time to a MySQL database, by adding or subtracting hours as in the example below.

$now = date('Y-m-d-G');

$now = strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H", strtotime("$now -8 hours"));

Convert HEX value to RBG

function hextorgb($hexvalue){

        if($hexvalue[0] == '#') {

                $hexvalue = substr( $hexvalue, 1);

        }

        if(strlen( $hexvalue ) == 6){

                list($r, $g, $b) = array($hexvalue[0] .$hexvalue[1], $hexvalue[2] . $hexvalue[3], $hexvalue[4] .$hexvalue[5]);

        }elseif (strlen($hexvalue) == 3) {

                list($r,$g,$b) = array($hexvalue[0] .$hexvalue[0], $hexvalue[1] . $hexvalue[1], $hexvalue[2] .$hexvalue[2]);

        }else{

                return false;

        }

        $r = hexdec($r);

        $g = hexdec($g);

        $b = hexdec($b);

        return array('R' => $r, 'G' => $g, 'B' => $b);

}

$rgb = hextorgb('#fff000');

print_r($rgb);

Display a users Gravatar image

function url_to_link($text){

            $reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";

            // Check if there is a url in the string

            if (preg_match_all($reg_exUrl, $text, $url)) {

                foreach($url[0] as $v){

                    $position = strpos($text,' '.$v)+1;

                    $text = substr_replace($text,'',$position, strlen($v));

                    $text = substr_replace($text,''.$v.'',$position ,0);

                }

                return $text;

            }

            else {

                // if no urls in the text just return the text

                return $text;

            }

        }

$string = 'This is a string of text and we have a link: http://ma-no.org we also have another link http://google.com';

echo url_to_link($string);

Parse JSON in PHP

$json='{"id":0,"name":"Silvia","surname":"Salvietta","Website":"http://ma-no.org"} ';

$array=json_decode($json);

// print the array

print_r($array);

echo $array->name;