PHP

It is very important to pay attention to time zones in PHP. Your server might be hosted in one location while your visitors might be in another time zone. The local time of your visitors will be different from your server’s. To handle such differences, there are several inbuilt PHP functions. These functions allow you to easily tell the timezone…

In PHP, the time() function is used to display the current Unix timestamp in milliseconds. Of course, a whole lot more can be achieved with this and other related functions. You can use the time function to find out the unix timestamp. This can later be formatted using the date() function. Example: <?php echo time(); ?> Output: 1414305327 If you…

If you need to work with date and time in PHP, you can use the date() function. It will output the date as well as time in your desired format. There are several formatting options. You can choose among them to decide how the date is displayed. A simple example use of date() function is: <?php echo date(“d M y”);…

Die and Exit These two constructs are equivalent with each other. They are used to stop the execution of the current PHP script. A message can also be printed as well. These are used when there is an error in a script and you want to exit it as soon as a problem is encountered. Like when you try to…

These four functions are used to add a PHP script file in another. This allows you to break your script into several files instead of having a single long file. You could have a file called functions.php with your user defined functions. Then include it in your other files to use those functions. All four of them behave differently. Let…

Variables by Reference Variables can also hold their value as a reference to another value. This means, a variable simply points to another variable. So whatever value the other variable holds, the reference variable also holds the same. For reference assignment we use an ampersand sign (&) after the equals to sign (=) while assigning a variable. Example: <?php $var1…

When you want to use variables outside your function for use within your function, you will have to use the keyword global. This will allow you to use variables declared outside of a function. It will even override the variables inside the function if they have the same name. You can also use it to access the variables inside the…

There are a lot of in-built functions in PHP. We have seen several of those already. We talked about string functions like strpos() and mathematical functions like pow(). There is a long list of these in-built functions. But the beauty of functions do not end there. Programmers can create their own functions to perform custom tasks. If you have to…

If you are looking to assign the values of an array to a group of variables with one statement, use list(). This construct is used to give a list of variables some value. They work only with arrays that use numeric indexes. Example: <?php $names = array (“Ashish”, “Michael”, “Chris”); list($name1, $name2, $name3) = $names; echo $name1; echo “<br />”;…

Cycling Through PHP Arrays When accessing the values of PHP arrays, looping them through foreach loops is not the only way. We can get individual values and keys of an array. There are invisible pointers in an array that tells the current position. We can cycle through them to get values at different positions of an array. We use current(),…