At 6/12/09 11:48 PM, J00blix wrote: You can always attempt creating your own encryption method, custom encryption is the hardest to break simply because nobody knows what or how the hell it works. Maybe convert everything with Rot-13, then add your custom encryption.

No, no, no, no, no! Don't do that! The thing about the encryption that's standard today is that they have had hundreds of incredibly clever people put them together, and orders of magnitude more obscenely clever people try and break them. These things have, for the most part, stood the test of time and proven to be totally infeasible to crack (by infeasible I mean "requires thousands of years of number crunching to even generate a result that almost certainly isn't what you started with").

I know people that crack encryption schemes for fun. Unless you have one hell of a background in cryptology, what you come up with is going to get cracked very quickly by someone who knows what they're doing.

Anyway back on topic; sha-1 or md5 work well for most purposes, provided you add a salt. Salts are just extra characters added to what your hashing so that the results aren't predictable; there are databases on the internet of hashes of common words for just about every encryption scheme you can imagine and salting stops these dead in their tracks.

And don't worry about the time; sha-1 and (especially) md5 are very, very fast. They won't add more than a few milliseconds onto your script time.

MySQL, hands down. XML is just.... ewww.

The main reason you wanna go with MySQL is that XML + XSLT just sit there; it's just the same as having a static webpage. You can't easily (or even efficiently) sort or filter your data. You also can't do thinks like link together related data.

I remember seeing an advert on slashdot ages ago that showed half of a formula one racecar connected to half of a tractor with the tag line "you use super fast java but you're still using a relational database? Click here for XML solutions." Damn that made me laugh.

At 1/30/09 11:03 AM, djbdr248 wrote:

At 1/30/09 09:55 AM, BoneIdol wrote:

At 1/29/09 04:32 PM, djbdr248 wrote: $to = $s_mail;
$s_name = $_POST['sender_name'];
$s_mail = $_POST['sender_mail'];

You try and set $to to $s_mail before $s_mail gets set.

How could I get it to attach a file to the email? like a jpg.

Oh god, you'd need to use a multipart mime encoded email. It has been a long time since I did this, and I did not find it especially pleasant. Thankfully, there is an excellent class available that will do it all for you (assuming you want to send the email as html). See http://www.phpguru.org/static/mime.mail.
html.

Also your BCC is because of your code:

:$header .= "X-Priority: 1";

$headers .= 'Bcc: vince@askmywife.com' . "\r\n";

Firstly you don't add a line break (\r\n) on your X-Priority and second you put the BCC in $headers instead of $header.

At 1/29/09 04:32 PM, djbdr248 wrote: $to = $s_mail;
$s_name = $_POST['sender_name'];
$s_mail = $_POST['sender_mail'];

You try and set $to to $s_mail before $s_mail gets set.

At 1/10/09 03:03 PM, Fullsteel wrote: Have php codes and work?

Yes, but only if you have access to work with the server's config files so you can set .shtml files to be sent to php. On Apache I believe this can be done by adding shtml onto the end of the application/x-httpd-php line in the mime.types file in conf/, but I'm not entirely sure.

At 1/9/09 09:16 PM, Momo-the-Monkey wrote: PHP just isn't my friend. I'm trying to execute the following regex code, but it doesn't appear to be working. Instead of detecting the outside blockquotes, it detects the inside-most blockquotes. So in a string like this one:

<blockquote>
this is boob
<blockquote>
bob is embedded
</blockquote>
</blockquote>

it only detects this:

<blockquote>
bob is embedded
</blockquote>

There is a very simple reason for this; regular expressions simply suck at recursion. Your regex will match <blockquote>{stuff}<blockquote>{stuff}</
blockquote> since it starts from an opening tag to the closing tag without caring if another opening tag is contained within .*.

If you're dealing with recursion you need to do some parser-like code (as in, identify tags/end tags from the top and bottom of a string inwards or the middle of a string outwards). Try using preg_split to break up your string then comparing the last elements in the resultant array with the first elements.

Use session handling functions instead of cookie functions: http://www.php.net/session

Session handling simply sets a cookie with a unique id and stores any data on the server instead. If the user already has a session cookie when you call session_start() their session variables are automatically restored for you. Much more secure and a crapload easier to use; it really is a case of:

<?php
  session_start();
  if (!$_SESSION['login']){
    die();
  }
?>

...to stop people accessing pages you don't want them to and...

session_start();
$query = 'SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = "' . mysql_escape_string( $_POST['username'] ) . " AND password = "' . md5( $_POST['password'] ) . '"';
$result = mysql_query( $query );
if (mysql_num_results( $query )){
  $_SESSION['login'] = true;
}

...to log them in. The only thing to watch out for is session_start() must be called before outputting any text via echo/print or html outside of <?php tags, including whitespaces.

At 1/4/09 09:40 PM, BillysProgrammer wrote: OMG, ill say this to you guys again and again

I know it doesnt, but u can USE php in ASP except there is a different tag rule.

Pay attention to the irc next time

Ummm no, not quite. You can configure php.ini to work with <% tags as well as <?php tags; but this is strongly encouraged again (for hopefully obvious reasons). It has nothing to do with ASP.

Also, oh dear. I've found so many problems with this (sorry if these are too harsh, I appear to have a sinus infection and am very irritable).

- Your tags page has a syntax error on the <% tag (no closing ').

- Your short, medium and long variables section far flat out bollocks; the first example is a normal variable (that you either define yourself or are dumb enough to have register_globals set to on in your php.ini), your second is a superglobal array ($_POST, $_GET etc.) and your third is the deprecated method of working with superglobals. You should talk more about variable types and arrays and (possibly) objects.

- Your page on constants doesn't really mention what they are for; making your code easier to read. ARTICLES_PER_PAGE is more descriptive than 20. You'll find most people don't use constants so much because they are so very, very ugly in PHP.

- You don't talk about doing comparisons at all in your if statements page. You should really mention using >, >= etc. You should also just use an else in your example; checking if it's true then checking if it's false looks really dumb.

- Formatting strings should really talk about using (s)print_f functions. I understand that this is a work in progress but they're sort of important.

Check out http://www.php.net/features.file-upload and http://www.tizag.com/phpT/fileupload.php to see how to do file uploads in php.

Also, if you're making a site for starcraft maps and have permission to install php extensions you should check out http://repasm.net/, it'll let you do things like generate minimaps of the scm/scx/rep files as the files are uploaded and get information out of replays like players' names and what their apm was etc..

Since we're all having a great time nitpicking...

At 1/3/09 02:15 PM, liaaaam wrote: See, computers use base 2 (binary) because electrons have 2 possible states: on/off. Off is 0 and on is 1, so a message can be sent from component to component by manipulating the electrons in short 'words' (8 bits long).. knowledge of binary and how computers work is very important in programming :P

Umm, wtf? We use binary because it's easier to make circuits with it, not because electrons have only 2 states; we just use 3 (I think) volts for on and 0 (or -3) volts for off. It's perfectly possible to have more states; in fact you can actually buy decimal computers (that work with electricity at 10 different voltages) but they are hideously complicated and very, very expensive.

As previously mentioned there is nothing special about binary, it's just a very simple way to store values.

div = division. It is a block level element that does what it says on the tin; it divides your html document into sections. It doesn't do anything else, but it can be styled in CSS.

Because it has no side effects and no meaning in semantic markup it is encouraged that you use divs for your layout, presentation and other meaningless parts of your html document.

Just expand on that and talk about how HTML is all about attaching meanings and value to things.

At 12/29/08 02:17 PM, Afro-Ninja wrote: Ha, at first glance I thought you were going to say that the use of nl2br was unacceptable.

REAL programmers use a regular expression to generate <p> tags for semantically correct markup. ;)

Also, just to clarify; all those were over the course of 2 years and as I mentioned I am a contrary bastard. Generally anything other programmers do in PHP tends to piss me off; it just depends on my mood, how good the coffee was that morning and whether or not I'm hung over.

Heh, take it the daily hate is having to deal with regular expressions then? ;)

I actually fired up wamp to deal with this one, as I've never had to deal with preg_replace_callback before. It appears that $matches contains the full match on index 0, then any backreferences are in indexes 1 upwards (which is sort of appropriate). The only difficulty is in reconstructing the string once your done.

This code appears to work for me:

function valid_link($matches){
	$check = '/^(((http(s?)|ftp):\/\/)|mailto:|aim:goim|ymsgr:sendIM|\/)/i';
	if(!preg_match($check, $matches[2])){
		$matches[2] = 'http://'.$matches[2];
	}
	return $matches[1] . $matches[2] . $matches[3];
}
$string = preg_replace_callback('/(<a href=")(.*?)(">)/is', "valid_link", $string);

"Regular Expressions; Now you have two problems!"

The following have pissed me off about PHP and websites I've worked on over the past 2 years (this is not an exhaustive list):

- Using parenthesis on echo and print, they are language constructs not functions
- echo "$variable"; (as mentioned)
- Using double quotes
- Using single quotes and .s
- . being the concatenate operator
- PHP scripts with syntax errors that mysteriously work then give wrong results when you fix them
- Having register globals on
- Commenting out lines of code with no explaination
- Too many comments
- Not enough comments
- Stupid comments
- Using mysql_* functions
- Using mysql_* functions and not using mysql_escape_string
- Using mysql_escape_string on integers (we have typecasting for that)
- mysql_real_escape_string
- PHP warnings being turned off through development then suddenly turned on on the server.
- safe_mode
- Using parametised queries
- Using stored procedures
- Not using switch/case statements
- Using switch/case statements with fall throughs
- Not using switch/case statements with fall throughs
- Not using JOINS in SQL (Eew, n+1 queries)
- Using JOINS in SQL (Eew, so slow on big databases)
- Caching
- Using PDO
- Using PDO stupidly
- Using PDO instead of nice libraries a framework offers
- Using PHP's OOP
- Retarded use of PHP's OOP
- Not using PHP's OOP
- Magic functions
- Serialize and deserialize functions
- OOP having no messaging/event system
- Try/catch statements
- Using really high level OOP concepts I don't understand very well
- Not using constructors
- Using regular expressions
- Not using regular expressions
- Using stupid regular expressions
- Rewriting built in PHP functions
- Using built in functions that annoy me (ala pathinfo)
- Weaving PHP blocks in between HTML
- Using templates
- Using template languages
- Too many include files
- Not enough include files
- Not using a framework
- Using a framework
- MVC
- Using MySQL
- Using other databases than MySQL
- Using SQLite (this deserves a special mention)
- Using a stupid, house-written framework
- Using a framework with horrible documentation (CakePHP)
- Using classic ASP
- Mixing classic ASP with PHP
- Not redirecting upon dealing with post data
- Sending emails via sendmail
- Sending emails via qmail
- Using MIME formatted emails
- Using HTML emails
- Using Multipart emails
- PHP 4
- Code written not to work in PHP 4
- PHP 6
- Unicode
- Not using basename on file uploads
- Using cron jobs
- Not being able to use cron jobs
- Using system calls
- Building pages from one index.php file and a load of $_GET vars, without using mod_rewrite
- Using a single include file to deal with all your $_POST data
- XML being used instead of a database
- XML being used
- Scripts off of free script sites
- Regular expressions off of free script sites (deservers another special mention)
- $_FILES superglobal being ordered ['name/tmp_name/etc.']['index'] instead of having the index first
- etc. etc...

So I have come to the conclusion that I am contrary, irritable and bitter.

*Wraps flu-ridden-self in asbestos blanket*

At 12/28/08 10:41 AM, adam2510 wrote: in 6 moths everything is getting moved to a new server that my freind will run from his house so hopefully i can convince him to give me php because there is no way to do it without having that risk of someone hacking it

Why can't he give you it now? It's not exactly difficult to set you up in a way where you'll only be able to cause damage to your own stuff. Or why not even install something like wamp or xampp and get started using php on your own pc? Once you get your head around it you should be able to secure your site without too much effort.

At 12/27/08 10:06 PM, Momo-the-Monkey wrote: As for code 1, I see what you mean. but I have no idea why you would want to add the s modifier to it. I just want to replace &gt; and &lt; in a tags to normal > and <. And assuming I have changed \\s to $s, I would also change the single quotes to double quotes, and escape the inner double quotes, correct?

Not as such no. I know for a fact it works in single quotes because I hardly ever use double quotes; hate the bloody things. I believe that in PHP single backslashes work for the replacements as well.

The s modifier means single line mode, which is quite possibly the dumbest name for it imaginable; what it does is allow . wildcard characters to match line breaks; without the s modifier . is equivelent to [^\n\r].

As for code 2, wow. Thanks. Sometimes I get so involved and get so regex happy that I don't even stop to think if there is a simpler way to do it. Hmm. Good lesson.

Heheheh, I'm exactly the same. It's so easy to fall into that trap. It's just that I am slightly more obsessive about the speed and readability of my code. ;)

See where it stops? Yup. If I search #&lt;a href=#i it works just fine. But when I add the &quot; it no longer detects it, even though the string I'm sifting through has &lt;a href=&quot; as it's beginning.

Are you sure htmlentities is converting the quotes into &quot;? I did a test find and replace in regexbuddy on your example (but changed the \\ to \ and dumped the # delimiters, since it uses a .net-style regex engine) and it worked fine. If you check out the htmlentities page on php.net you can see that there's a few constants you can pass it to change how it handles quotes. Either way try printing out the output of your string after it's been passed to htmlentities.

Bit of nitpicking, you might wanna start your link with http:// or ftp:// or some other protocol. Just www. on it's own will be seen as a relative link rather than an absolute one. You might also want to make your links a bit more flexible with whitespace using \s and some liberal * and +s.

And thanks oodles. Where would I be without you? lol.

I'm just glad there's someone else on the planet I can talk to about regular expressions; everyone seems to detest the marvelous, hideous things. ;)

At 12/27/08 12:08 PM, PickleNoise wrote: But wait! You're doing forum software, right? Then you probably don't want people to be able to spam new lines. Here's a line to only process one newline:

preg_replace("/(\r\n)+|(\n|\r)+/", "<br />", $body);

Call me old fashioned but I quite like being able to make paragraphs in my posts.

At 12/27/08 03:51 AM, SmdSkata wrote:

At 12/24/08 02:27 PM, smulse wrote:

At 12/23/08 07:58 PM, SmdSkata wrote: -Editable text when exported to HTML!! I love it.

Ohh please no.

Why the ohh no?

Generated html is invariably horrific; it's generally bulky, table based (as in, the whole page layout is put together inside a table. This is bad) and really bad for search engines and text-only web browsers. Code it yourself in html and css from scratch.

Also, on topic, I would recommend you acquire a copy of Photoshop, Flash and then buy a few stock image CDs. They would serve you a lot better than a load of programs you'll never use.

Fireworks is just gimmicky and all the stuff I see done in it looks really cheesy. Illustrator isn't really all that useful unless you're going full on into illustrating and vector art; for what you probably need Flash is probably sufficient and allows you to do animations and games too.

Code 1 is easily sorted: firstly you could do with an s modifier with your i so that it can span multiple lines and secondly try replacing \\s with $s in your replace. PHP gets confused by perl's \\ notation for backreferences since \ is the escape character in PHP.

As for code 2, could you not just do something with normal string functions for this job? Something like:

if (count( explode( "\n", $string ) ) > 5){
  echo 'You are only allotted 5 lines of text.';
}

While regular expressions are very fast you should use normal string functions when you can; they're faster, easier to read and only require that you know PHP to maintain them. Regular expressions, like perl, are infamously described as "write only languages" and are NOT a silver bullet; they're more like a double edged sword.

My guess is that the middle element is taking up too much horizontal space. IE is notorious for sometimes adding a space after an image if there's any whitespace after it. Try floating the image as well and adding clear:left; to your ad paragraph.

Ah, just took another look at your link (sorry double post etc.). I see your problem. Rather than keep that bit as one table, split it up into a table for your posts and one for your comics and then do something similar to my first post.

What you want is:

<table width="318">
  <!-- Latest Comics -->
</table>
<img src="december08.png" />
<table width="318">
  <!-- Latest Posts -->
</table>

At 12/26/08 10:50 AM, Andy-Smithy wrote: Thanks for your reply

I'm not sure how to actually display the rows separately, thats the thing =/

Well, um can you explain what you mean a bit better? If you just want to grab a row at a time just cut out the while loop. You can use mysql_fetch_array outside a loop and it'll return a row. You could, for example do something like...

if ($row = mysql_fetch_array( $results )){
  //Some layout stuff for that row
}

...5 times. That's essentially what that while bit is doing anyway (only it keeps doing it until it encounters a false).

I would not recommend doing this though; if you have to do something like this chances are you've gone wrong in your design somewhere. You want to keep things consistent, your posts should be set out in a structured way in their own block rather than here there and everywhere.

Could you not just do something like this?

<?php       
  mysql_connect ( '***', '***', '***')or die("Could not connect: ".mysql_error());
  if (mysql_select_db('***')){
    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY 'pid' DESC LIMIT 0, 5;" );
  }
?>
<table>
<?php while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { ?>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <?php echo "<a href=\"showthread.php?tid={$row['tid']}&pid={$row['pid']}#pid{$row['pid']}\">{$row['subject']}</a><br />"; ?>
    </td>
  </tr>
<?php } ?>
</table>

Merry Christmas! What goodies did everyone get this year?

I got a really nice digital camera (and a load of accessories for it), some clothes, a Snoopy DVD, some aftershave, a windup toy, Terry Pratchett's new book and a metric crapload of chocolate. :D Oh, and a card from my brother that read: "Tiny Little Penis" on the front.

At 12/23/08 11:40 PM, WoogieNoogie wrote: I'm tending to agree...unless you're not an alt, you should know that Neill has earned the RIGHT to be annoying.

Has adam2510?

At 12/24/08 07:57 AM, AnalogStick wrote:

At 12/23/08 06:15 PM, BillysProgrammer wrote: Wrong Section. Please go to the flash forum

You know, seeing as you are NOT a programmer, you do NOT need to post. Your statement is so unimaginably wrong that it is impossible to describe.

Ooooh eeeerrr, someones not in the christmas spirit today. ;)

To conclude what could have been done on the first post; as previously mentioned Math.random() gives a number between 0 and 1. However if you want a number between 0 and 7, simply go:

Math.random() * 7

This works because 0 * 7 = 0 and 1 * 7 = 7. So you can get 0, 7 and just about any number in between. You may have to round it up though since you can get 6.54321 or something. In Java/AS you need to pass the result to Math.round() like so:

var randomnum = Math.round( Math.random() * 7 );

See everyone? That wasn't so hard!

I seriously think it'd be better for everyone we answered simple questions and went "In future please use the flash forum". This saves the OP from having to ask the question again, saves newgrounds from having to add yet more rows to the forum database and saves everyone in the whole world from having to think we're a set of collosal pricks.

At 12/23/08 01:33 PM, DannyIsOnFire wrote:

At 12/23/08 10:58 AM, 25272D wrote: So why do you drink alcohol then? It tastes shit, it's only purpose is to intoxicate you.

Lies!

I second this. Alcohol doesn't taste bad at all, but it is an acquired taste. When I first started drinking (at the age of 15... god I'm a chav. :() I couldn't stand the taste of lagers. I think that firstly you get more accustomed to the taste and secondly your taste buds change as you get older, so it doesn't taste quite so bitter.

Also, I second...

At 12/23/08 11:43 PM, WoogieNoogie wrote: I drink like I smoke. Only in social situations. Drinking alone adds the psychological issues...same with smoking. If it's social, it's a different kind of psychological standpoint.

...this. I seriously do not understand how people can drink on their own. It just seems really tragic to me, but a lot of my friends will have a beer or two before bed or while they're playing on xbox live. Why they can't just pop into the pub and have a chat if they fancy a quick drink is beyond me.

So yeah, whos up for a drink? I'll get the first round in. :D

Merry Christmas! Peace on earth and good will toward men (and women).

At 12/23/08 06:14 AM, Jessii wrote:

At 12/22/08 10:39 PM, blah569 wrote: If only more people lurked the programming forum might you guys have a song as well :P.

That has got to be one of the worst songs I've ever heard! If one of us were to make a song, we would require something much better than that.

Wish I knew more about actually composing music now. I may have a go at flinging something together with my guitar, bass and a few drum samples or something. I have the perfect title for the song though; "Learn to google!"

At 12/23/08 03:19 AM, adam2510 wrote: why does everyone want to get smashed...

you should get laid or play poker or something like that

or will you do that allready before you get smashed

Well...

1) Getting smashed is fun.
2) Getting smashed often leads to getting laid (for some of us maybe ;)).
3) Quite a few of us are from the UK; most of us brits only ever socialise in the pub.
4) Lawl, poker on new years eve. That sounds a hoot. >_<
5) This is the programming forum. ;)
6) I thought you were from Australia or somewhere where it's equally sacrilegious to say that?

At 12/21/08 09:20 PM, adam2510 wrote: dont worry anyway all i am getting from everyone at the moment is that they think they are better than me when THATS not what i want

Protip: Most people here only think they're better than people they're actually better than. ;)