Before:

Hello This Is An Example Of A Sentence Which Has Odd Capitalization Which You May Want Fixing. tHere Are Problems With This Method, Which I Will disclose Shortly. If You Know How To Improve THis Code Please Let Me Know.

After:

Hello this is an example of a sentence which has odd capitalization which you may want fixing. There are problems with this method, which i will disclose shortly. If you know how to improve this code please let me know.

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//define string
$string = "Hello This Is An Example Of A Sentence Which Has Odd Capitalization Which You May Want Fixing. tHere Are Problems With This Method, Which I Will disclose Shortly. If You Know How To Improve THis Code Please Let Me Know.";
 
//first we make everything lowercase, and then make the first letter if the entire string capitalized
$string = ucfirst(strtolower($string));
 
//now we run the function to capitalize every letter AFTER a full-stop (period).
$string = preg_replace_callback('/[.!?].*?\w/', create_function('$matches', 'return strtoupper($matches[0]);'),$string);
 
//print the result
echo $string;

There you have it. But there are flaws with this code, which you should be aware of.

Recognised problems to consider

This code will only capitalize the first letter of the string and all letters after full-stops (periods). Names, acronyms and countries will become lowercase when they should be capitalized.

Acronyms with full-stops won’t return as they should appear. For example, “e.g.” will return as “e.G.” because the G is directly after a full-stop.

A common problem is the word “I”, it will be returned in lowercase. For example, “You and i may have to make some exceptions”

Solutions

The way I overcome these issues by making rules with the str_replace function. Put these exceptions after the function has run and before printing the results. This isn’t an ideal solution for large lumps of data as there would be a lot of exceptions, but it’s useful for a manageable data size. You could, however, create your own function(s) to make the clean up process quicker and easier to handle large data.

Possible solutions

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//to overcome the e.G. problem
$string = str_replace("e.G.","e.g.", $string);
 
//to overcome the lowercase i problem
$string = str_replace(" i "," I ", $string);
 
//to overcome the acronym problem
$string = str_replace("dps","DPS", $string);

Does anyone have any better solutions, or perhaps even improvements to the existing code?

To generate the date dropdown fields shown above, you could hardcode the values, like this….

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<select name="year">
<option value="1999">1999</option>
<option value="2000">2000</option>
<option value="2001">2001</option>
<option value="2002">2002</option>
<option value="2003">2003</option>
<option value="2004">2004</option>
<option value="2005">2005</option>
<option value="2006">2006</option>
</select>

But that’s a very tedious and long way of doing it. A better solution is to use a for loop in PHP to generate the dates. The following code i’m using automatically generates the dates with a few lines of PHP…

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<select name="day">
	<?for($day=1; $day <= 31; ++$day):?>
		<?
                //this code is adding a 0 before all values less than 10
                //you don't need this code, but I prefer to have 2 digit values
		if($day < 10)
		{
			$day = "0".$day;
		}
		?>
		<option value="<?=$day?>"><?=$day?></option>
	<?endfor;?>
</select>
<select name="month">
	<?for($month=1; $month <= 12; ++$month):?>
		<?
                //this code is adding a 0 before all values less than 10
                //you don't need this code, but I prefer to have 2 digit values
		if($month < 10)
		{
			$month = "0".$month;
		}
		?>
		<option value="<?=$month?>"><?=$month?></option>
	<?endfor;?>
</select>
<select name="year">
	<?
        //The 60 value here is the amount of years to go back
	$year = date("Y") - 60;
        //The 60 value here is the amount of years to go forward
        //because i went back 60 years, i'm going forward 60 years so the dropdown will always have the current year, going back 60 years.
	for ($i = 0; $i <= 60; ++$i)
	{
		echo "<option>$year</option>"; ++$year;
	}
	?>
</select>

The above code will generate dropdowns for day, month and year! I’ve commented in areas where I felt appropriate.

Does anyone know a better way to do this with PHP? Would love to hear your tips…

The Scenerio

A client recently changed permalink structures for his entire website. For example, all his blog links were as follows:
http://www.example.com/blog/2009/12/09/example-blog-post/

For various reasons, the webmaster wanted to change the structure to:
http://www.example.com/blog/example-blog-post/ (stripping out the date)

The problem was, almost all the pages were internally linking to one another with the old URL structure, so the actual content of the page needed to be updated. In fact, in most cases, there were 4 or 5 links that needed to be updated on each page.

The webmaster didn’t want to manually modify each page because it would obviously take forever and a day. At first I thought it could be done with an MySQL query (page content is stored in a DB), but it actually can’t, so I had to create a PHP script to change all the links. The key function to enable this being preg_replace.

The Solution

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// define the pattern you want to replace. The "d" is for "digit", you can use "w" for alpanumeric
$pattern = '/example.co.uk\/blog\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\//';
 
//define the placement
$replacement = 'example.co.uk/blog/';
 
$string = "this is the string we want to replace <a href="http://www.example.co.uk/blog/2009/12/09/example-blog-post">link</a>. More writing here <a href="http://www.example.co.uk/blog/2009/12/09/example-blog-post">link</a>";
 
$string = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
echo $string;
 
//the output will be as follows:
this is the string we want to replace <a href="http://www.example.co.uk/blog/example-blog-post">link</a>. More writing here <a href="http://www.example.co.uk/blog/example-blog-post">link</a>

And there you have it. Because it’s a regular expression function, the pattern is replaced EVERYTIME it is matched. The example above was the core function in the script I wrote. I actually used it in a while loop, to update a specific field in every row in a specific table, so each page was updated.

If anyone actually uses this example, please let me know how you get on with it.

Suppose I have a loop, and I want to call a certain action on every 5th loop. For example, on the 5th, 10th, 15th..etc count, I want to call an action.

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<?
for($i = 1; $i < 21; $i++)
{
	if ($i % 5 == 0)
	{
		echo "Hello World";
	}
}
?>

In the example above, “Hello World” will echo on the 5th, 10th, 15th and 20th count.

Example

Ok, so we want the filename for the following page:

http://www.anydomain.co.uk/page/grab.php

We want to grab the filename, which is grab.php

The following code will do that for you:

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$basename = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

If you want to remove the .php, a simple string replace function will do:

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$basename = str_replace(".php","",basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));

And that’s it.