<?php
class foo {
    private $bar = 42;
}
 
$obj = new foo;
$propname="\0foo\0bar";
$a = (array) $obj;
echo $a[$propname];
?>

Or PHP 5.3+ using Reflections:

<?php
static function expose($obj, $prop) {
   $reflection = new ReflectionClass($obj);
   $prop = $reflection->getProperty($prop);
   return $prop->getValue($obj);
} 
?>

Great tip from Derick Rethans.

For loops for concise conditional logic

Have you ever come across a pattern where you need to set a new variable, check it against another limit variable and then depending on a condition (limit variable is greater/lesser than your new variable), update it accordingly?

Here’s an example:

$page = $_GET['page'];
if ( $page < 0 ) {
  $page = 1; // pages can't be lower than 1
}

While the above snippet is completely readable (and somewhat contrived), there’s a more concise way to use for loops to achieve the same result:

for( $page = $_GET['page']; $page < 1; $page = 1 );

The reason this works is because the for loop has three useful parts: initialization, conditional and mutator. If you ever come across a pattern in code that requires a combination of the three, chances are you can use a for loop. The above would be evaluated as follows:

1. $page gets initialized
2. the conditional is evaluated
3. if found true, it runs through the for loop execution (which is empty)
4. the mutation section sets $page to 1
5. it evaluates the conditional again and finds it to be false and exits out of the for loop

For loops for short circuit search

There are times when you need to find the index of an element in an array provided it matches some condition. For example, let’s say you have an array of breadcrumb nodes, and you need to walk the array to find out at which index the current page matches. If you have lots of pages in the array, you’d probably want to walk the array as far as your match. Using a while, it looks like:

$arr = array(
     '/home/', 
     '/home/products/',
     '/home/products/1', 
     '/home/products/2' );
$this_page = '/home/products/1';
$i = 0;
 
while( $arr[$i] != $this_page ) {
  $i++;
}
// $i = 2

Now let’s try that with a for loop:

for( $i = 0; $arr[$i] != $this_page; $i++ );

What else can you do with a for loop?

You can implement reverse sort pretty concisely:

function swap( &$a, &$b ) {
   $temp = $a;
   $a = $b;
   $b = $temp;
}
 
function reverse( &$arr ) {
   for($i=0,$j=count($arr)-1;
        $j>$i;
        swap($arr[$i++],$arr[$j--])
    );
}
 
$arr = array( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 );
reverse( $arr );
 
// $arr = array( 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 );

I hope this helps you find more unorthodox uses of the useful for loop, and realize that it’s not just to iterate over a collection/array. If you already use for loops in a clever way, leave a comment and share with others.

1. Make people happy
2. Think about emotions
3. Obsess over aesthetics

Joel is right – developers don’t necessarily want to think about beautifying their applications. Developers largely work on the middle-tier and supporting backends, and like everyone, they have an underlying desire for their work to be observed and appreciated. If the ’skin’ of the application garners all the attention, developers might feel slighted, and their kickass software go unappreciated.

But it’s important to think about beautifying the application as an enhancement to the great product. Imagine it as if you’re working hard to restore a great relic automobile. You work tirelessly to juice up the engine and get the transmission just right. But the paint job that you add to it is equally important and you shouldn’t hold back making it shine – REALLY shine. After all, hardly anyone’s going to listen to the roaring engine if they don’t even notice your shiny car rolling in.

’nuff said. Now to go get some caffeine.

I can’t list all the neat stuff that Eli covered, but something that caught my attention was the topic of closing connections early. I’ve been trying to find an elegant way to solve this problem for a personal project and this might just be the way to do it. Here’s some rough code (more specific code examples to come later):


ignore_user_abort(true);
header("Connection: close");
header("Content-Length: ", mb_strlen($response));
echo $response;
flush();


The ignore_user_abort(true) function basically lets your script continue execution even though the user might have hit the STOP button in his browser, or the connection between the user and your script got disconnected, etc. This neat code above lets you return a quick response (great for Ajax button clicks) so that you can update client side – keeping your site fast and responsive – while your script chugs along server side.

More updates coming up today, but don’t forget to come to the PHP Nightclub event (starts at 8pm) and check out the Yahoo! gang. Btw, the event is open to all, so there’s no excuse to miss it!

These types of sessions make conferences interesting and a learning experience (and ultimately worth spending your time at). Even though a lot of material might be common knowledge (covered in books, papers, online articles), it’s always important to get a sense of validation when you see their presentations with live data and hear comments from the audience about possible problems and gotchas.

Of course, no conference is complete without the odd product placement presentations (I’m looking at you IBM and Adobe) but as long as they keep their presentations geared towards providing solutions rather than forcing you to buy into their solution, I’m all for it.

If you’re at ZendCon 07, make sure to drop by the Yahoo! booth in the reception area where I’ll be handing out purple tote bags and chatting about the interesting things we do at Yahoo! (and Yahoo! Research in particular).

Searching around a bit, I found that Chris Brown had already thought of this way back in May 06. He created an applescript called TuneTag which was exactly what I was looking for. Except that I wanted to use the Grouping field instead of the more general Comments field (which I use for other purposes).

After a little bit of tweaking (actually just a search and replace), I integrated the script with Quicksilver (copy the .scpt files to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions). Once you’ve gotten that done, pull up the Quicksilver menu, hit the “.” and type your (space-separated) tags, tab over and type in “tag” to pull up the script and hit Enter.

That should start you off adding tags to your current playing song. But proper organization goes a little further. I listen (read screen) a lot of songs to see if they’re up to my *ahem* world-class quality. I usually have a smart playlist set up to only include the songs added to the collection in the last day. I go through this list, and if I like any of the songs, I add a tag (using all the stuff above) called “atc” (add to collection). The final step is to add a new smart playlist to only keep off of the “atc” tag so that you can copy these songs over to your permanent collection while getting rid of the rest easily.

Here’s the modified script released under a Creative Commons license.

A few tweaks you may want to use to further enhance. I found myself typing “ls” for “list” too often and then having to correct it. To have “ls” also work as “list”, change line 271 from 271: "list" ) to 271: "list" | "ls" ). You can also do the same for “do” (or “done” as I like it). Change line 254 from 254: "do" ) to 254: "do" | "done" )

Finally, I edited the todobot.pl script to support multi-user control. Download the updated todobot.pl script. Rename the file to todobot.pl. You can add multiple usernames by separating them with commas like: my $commander = 'username1, username2, username3';

Update: I’ve changed the todobot.pl to include a “die” command so that you can take it offline remotely. This signs the bot out of AIM, and also gracefully kills the todobot.pl script. This is included in the todobot.pl script above.

Now you can run the script as perl todobot.pl > /dev/null & (pipes the output to null so it doesn’t clutter up your Terminal and also pushes the process to the background). This is where the “die” command comes in handy – no more having to figure out the process id to kill your IM bot.

Please email bugs to mxz at headphono.us

After much searching, being unable to find a widget for the 2006 World Cup schedule (atleast for the Mac), I decided to code it up real quick. It was a very rush job – snippets of code thrown together – so it may be a little buggy. Please forward all bugs to me at mxz AT headphono DOT us. The current version is 1.00. Watch out for bug releases (if any).

As always, I’d love to hear all suggestions.

UPDATE: Direct download link here.