Automatic tabindex with PHP

As most of us who’ve created HTML forms know, the tabindex attribute is a nice way to force text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns and buttons to be in a predefined order, so the user can utilise the tab key to navigate between them.

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Sanitising uploaded filenames

Because of the differences in the way Linux and Windows systems handle filenames, and because users often upload files which have spaces, quotes, and other punctuation characters in the name, it’s important that you strip out these characters from the filename before saving the file on the webserver.

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Why bother with development frameworks?

Having worked with a couple of web application frameworks over the last couple of years, I got thinking.

Why is it that almost all the largest, busiest and most successful websites weren’t developed with a framework? Why didn’t the developers of Wikipedia, Facebook or Wordpress choose to use Symfony, Codeigniter, Mojavi or any of the other frameworks which claim to be the best?

Is it something to do with the reality that they’re often too complicated to learn in the first place? And even when they’re put to actual use on real websites, even the best ones are so bloated, that they simply crawl along at a snail’s pace?

Converting PHP arrays to XML

I thought I’d share with you a PHP class I found useful lately. I had to take a comma-delimited text file and turn it into an XML text stream. With the ubiquity of XML these days, you might find it useful too, if you dabble in PHP software development.

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The most useful PHP function?

I know that PHP has a lot of functions built right in, some of which are used frequently and some sparingly. But what about “home made” functions that we’ve created? Which are the most used?

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