Chris Tate-Davies

An archive of helpful tit bits of information for development, and probably some stuff that is incomplete, wrong or boring…

Regex – “The” searching

Say you have a list of movie titles, and you want to either sort them, or search through them, and some of them have “The ” at the start, for example: The Simpsons Simpson Street When doing a MySQL search: SELECT * FROM movies WHERE title LIKE “The Simp%”; Would only return the first row. [...]

MySQL – Order by certain value first

Ever wanted to sort a resultset of data, by value, but I wanted a couple of exceptions to appear at the top? SELECT country, population, CASE country WHEN ‘United Kingdom’ THEN 0 WHEN ‘United States’ THEN 1 WHEN ‘New Zealand” THEN 2 ELSE country END AS countrySort FROM countryList  ORDER BY countrySort ASC; This will [...]

Javascript Language Translation

On a project I am working on, I need to enable language translation. Thinking about it, turned into something quite complicated. But then I found the Google Language API which allows developers to hook into the Google Languages services. So, I start a page – enabling UTF-8 character sets: < meta content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ http-equiv=”content-type”> And [...]

MySQL Incorrect String value “x/80″

MySQL Incorrect String value replication error. We use ANT for releasing versions of our PHP applications. Its very smart and takes a lot of the problems related to releases out of the equation. However, everytime we performed a release, our replication server would break, and I’d have to skip a load of database delta error [...]

Help in using Ubuntu Terminal Console

Help in using Ubuntu Terminal Console Remote connection To ssh to another Lunix terminal, use this command: ssh username@host -p port The default SSH port is 21, but you could change it to anything, i.e. 9100 Remote teminal will prompt for your password, and job done. File/Folder functions cp – Copy file cp /usr/bin/file /tmp/location [...]

Ubuntu Console commands for SVN

Console commands in Ubuntu for use with subversion Checkout a branch: svn checkout url@revision path To update your local source: svn up And to commit a single file: svn ci -m “message for commit” <files> Multiple committing is just without the <files>. To download a revision svn co -r 1671<remotefolder> <localfolder> <remotefolder> could be any [...]

REGEX – Remove Letters from string

Removing letters from a string using Regular Expressions. Very simple. but brain bending – All I wanted to do was remove a prefix from a string. The prefix was always letters, and I only wanted the numerical suffix returned, so though, preg_replace was my best bet. echo preg_replace(“/[a-zA-Z]*/”, ”, ’12345MystrING67890′); This returns : 1234567890 Perfect.

TabIndex in HTML

TabIndex is an attribute to HTML elements that tells the browser which control takes focus next when TAB is pressed. <input id=”one” tabindex=”3″ /> <input id=”two” tabindex=”1″ /> <input id=”three” tabindex=”2″ /> <input id=”four” tabindex=”4″ /> Here, once the page is loaded, the first TAB press will set focus to input two, and then subsequent [...]

Dependency Injections

Dependency Injections When creating PHP classes, particulary when utilising Unit tests, its a good idea to use dependancy injections. This enables us to use a robust reliable class which is not hard coded to rely (depend) on certain factors. If you were to use the Zend_Mail_Service in your class, it would work fine, but we [...]

MySQL REPLACE

I’d not come across REPLACE as a MySQL function before. I’d always used a combination of concatination of LEFTs and RIGHTs and the occasional MID. Unbelievable that I’d not found this function before… SELECT REPLACE(fieldname, “look for”, “replace with”) FROM tablename; So simple…

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  • Chris Tate-Davies

    Hello there. This is my little "repository" on the world wide web. Its for nothing more than documenting things that I might need again in the future. You could describe it as an extension to my memory.

    Also an online collaboration of my thoughts through the day. I'll try to keep the real random stuff out and keep the blog on course.

    Thanks for stopping by... Hope you find what you're looking for...

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