PHP/MySQL Tip of the Day

I'll be posting my PHP/MySQL tip of the day at this blog as an easy way to archive them and keep track of comments. In this first post I'll summarize my first week of tips:

Monday, March 2nd

Here’s an article with 40 simple tips for optimizing your PHP code.
http://reinholdweber.com/?p=3
I was aware of many of these –but there are a lot on here that were new to me. I don’t suggest you go tear apart all of your existing code to fix things based on these 40 things, but it might help you in your day-to-day coding.

Tuesday, March 3rd

I’ll shift to MySQL today. Here’s a short little article on using “LOAD DATA INFILE”, which is a great resource for loading client-supplied spreadsheets into a database without having to write a script. The example used demonstrates a technique where you can transform the file data to the different fields in your table using built-in mysql functions and also how to skip columns.

http://tech.forumone.com/archives/64-MySQL-Tips-1.html


Wednesday, March 4th

It’s important that any PHP programmer have a good understanding of security issues. Here are a couple of informative articles I located:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-security-blunders/2/
http://webmaster-forums.code-head.com/showthread.php?t=939
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/5-helpful-tips-for-creating-secure-php-applications/

That’s just a small sample. There are a lot of good ones out there- just google it.

Probably the most important security tip that consistently pops up in all of these articles is to NEVER TRUST USER INPUT. If you follow that rule you’re already half way there with regards to writing secure code. Sanitize form data, check file upload mime types, use PHP SESSIONS over cookies, etc.

Security issues are also a big part of the Zend exam, so that’s yet another reason to be aware of good security practices.

Thursday, March 5th

Use php.net for referencing function details. This should be the first place you go when you need specifics about how a given function operates. They explain all the parameters, the return values and give examples along with often very useful user-supplied comments.

If you know the name of the function you can access it quickly by just typing in php.net/function_name . For example php.net/str_replace will take you right to the page for the ‘str_replace’ function.

Friday, March 6th

In the process of studying for the MySQL exams I’ve come across several aspects of MySQL that I wasn’t previously aware of. One such thing is the fact that you can designate a numeric column in a table as ZEROFILL. What this does is cause a field to be left-padded with zeroes (up to the max length of the column) upon select. So if you declare:

CREATE table TEST (
id INT(7) ZEROFILL NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(64)
)

So if the value of id is ‘123’, when you do a select it would return ‘0000123’ rather than just 123. I usually do this kind of thing in the PHP code using str_pad or something similar, so it’s nice to have this available if needed.

The mysql manual mentions ZEROFILL but doesn’t really explain it well: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-type-overview.html