I came across this Stack Overflow question today about replacing radio buttons with images, however the answers there didn't sit quite right with me. They were completely reliant on javascript, which was fine according to the OP, but I feel that javascript enhancements like this, especially when they deal with things which require user input, [...]

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Just a small post here to share a bit of benchmarking I just did. In Javascript, the boolean operators (|| and &&) behave a little differently to how many people expect. In PHP, the result of using || or && is always a boolean:

// PHP:
$x = "hello" || false; // bool(true)
$x = false || 0; [...]

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Here's another common mistake I see on Stack Overflow from time to time. The basic pattern goes like this:

// get the contents from some remote file
$('#myElement').load('lipsum.html');   
alert($('#myElement').html());   
// wtf, it's still empty?!?

This is something that I struggled with when I started playing with AJAX techniques, too. It's quite understandable how so many people [...]

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I've decided to start writing a short series of posts highlighting some common mistakes I see in questions and, more importantly, answers on Stack Overflow. I enter this knowing fully well that I am but an amateur who is also learning new things daily. Anyway, the series kicks off with Part Zero, titled 83.333% of [...]

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Here's a little snippet of the day for you. A regex to grab the names of functions from a PHP file.

/^\s*(?:(?:public|private|protected|static|abstract|final)\s+)*
function\s+&?([a-zA-Z_\x7f-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x7f-\xff]*)/

Linebreak added for legibility.
If you were wanting to know the functions which exist in a particular class or file for an application or similar, you'd be better off using the PHP Reflection functions which are [...]

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A very useful jQuery tip which I've picked up, but also noticed that isn't widely known is to do with the common document.ready function. The old way to do it is like this:

$(document).ready(function() {
});

This method is preferred by some developers, because they see it as being more expressive: you are writing a function to be [...]

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Continuing with my fascination with the important things in programming languages — that's right, comment control structures — I have another idea!
Something which is a constant source of annoyance when using block comments is that sometimes you already have a block comment inside the larger area you are wishing to comment out:

function foo() {
    [...]

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I've come into the habit of altering my jQuery queries to hopefully optimise them to run faster. For example, if I wanted to get the html of the first "a" element...

// i'd use this:
$("a:first").html()
// instead of this, which is functionally identical
$("a").html()

It makes sense right? Don't bother getting all the elements, just stop at the first [...]

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There seems to be quite some confusion when it comes to working with dates and Unix timestamps, especially when there are multiple timezones involved. I thought I would write up a bit of an explanation to help clarify the situation, and show some of the better ways to deal with this in PHP.
First up, some [...]

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Here's a little, mostly useless tip. If you need to toggle between two blocks of code (for example, comment out a block of text and replace with debugging values, and then switch back again), instead of doing it like a noob...

// $myArray = $database->getObject();
// $myOtherArray = doSomethingElse();
$myArray = array("foo");
$myOtherArray = array("fu", "bar");

.. use this technique [...]

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