Years ago I discovered someone’s libraries to convert .mid music files to text by means of PHP. Since PHP is also a strong text parsing language, I can imagine how to utilize this to possibly create some randomized decent music. But it is a bit complex. Here is a link to a page where it seems the author is doing the most to maintain the PHP MIDI library. Posted in PHP | Leave a reply

Ok, so many times, you may have a desire for all (or some) files from a particular folder stored as an array. Here’s one way how.

<?php
if ($handle = opendir('.')) {
    while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle))) {
        if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..") {
            echo $entry."<br/>";
        }
    }
    closedir($handle);
}
?>

So what the above code does is:
1) creates a handle to the folder named ‘.’
2) iterate through every file within the folder provided
3) As long as the filename is not ‘.’ or ‘..’ then echo the filename followed by a

4) at the end of the full iteration, properly close the handle

Hopefully this alone can inspire you to do much more. Today I need to get all .pdf files stored in one deep subfolder, store those filenames to an array, so I can sort the array alphabetically and use a loop to output links to download each .pdf document.

Here’s how to write to clean array, even alphabetize by filename;

<?php
$files = array();
if ($handle = opendir('.'))
{
    	while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle)))
    	{
        	if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..")
        	{
            	$files[] = $entry;
        	}
    	}
    	closedir($handle);
}
sort($files);
?>

I’ve been creating PDF files with help of the FPDF library for PHP, which is a very helpful tool. But I’ve discovered that PDF’s always seem to be at 300dpi, where the image you may want to position in it is not that same dpi. I produced these conversion functions to handle the simple math. Notice the second variable argument, dpi, is preset to 300 but can be over-ridden if you need.

<?php

function px2mm($pixels, $dpi=300)
{
	return ($pixels * 25.4) / $dpi;
}

function mm2px($mm, $dpi=300)
{
	return ($mm * $dpi) / 25.4;
}

?>

I had a project where I wanted to initially stamp a date, and then be able to not only compute how long it has been since that moment – but also display it in a pretty english format.

<?php
// you can get the number of seconds since the epoch as simple as:
$s = date("U");
?>

Let’s say you perform this twice and record it, you can now subtract the smaller number from the larger number to know how many seconds span the difference between the two dates. Now I wanted to know that value, not in seconds, but in like number of days, number of hours, number of minutes. I used this function:

<?php
function Sec2Time($time){
  if(is_numeric($time)){
    $value = array("years"=>0, "days"=>0, "hours"=>0, "minutes"=>0, "seconds"=>0);
    if($time >= 31556926){
      $value["years"] = floor($time/31556926);
      $time = ($time%31556926);
    }
    if($time >= 86400){
      $value["days"] = floor($time/86400);
      $time = ($time%86400);
    }
    if($time >= 3600){
      $value["hours"] = floor($time/3600);
      $time = ($time%3600);
    }
    if($time >= 60){
      $value["minutes"] = floor($time/60);
      $time = ($time%60);
    }
    $value["seconds"] = floor($time);
    return (array) $value;
  }else{
    return (bool) FALSE;
  }
}
?>

Now I can use this:

<?php
$diff = abs(strtotime(date("Y-m-d H:i:s")) - strtotime($a['datetime_assigned']));
$timeArray = Sec2Time($diff);
if($timeArray['days']>0){ echo $timeArray['days']."d "; }
echo $timeArray['hours']."h ";
echo $timeArray['minutes']."m";
?>

And the above can output something like: 6d 14h 37m , which is what I wanted for my project.

You can do a lot of really cool things with Google Maps. It begins with understanding that every geographical position on the planet is defined as coordinates of latitude and longitude degrees, which is the angular distance north/south of equator & west/east of the prime meridian (Greenwich, England).

We’re going to use PHP cURL to query GoogleMaps for JSON data and immediately convert that to a multidimensional associative array and snag just what we want to learn (latitude/longitude for this address).

function curl_fetch($Url){
    // is cURL installed yet?
    if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
        die('Sorry cURL is not installed!');
    }
     // OK cool - then let's create a new cURL resource handle
    $ch = curl_init();
     // Now set some options (most are optional)
     // Set URL to download
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $Url);
     // Set a referer
//   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.example.org/yay.htm");
     // User agent
//   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MozillaXYZ/1.0");
     // Include header in result? (0 = yes, 1 = no)
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
     // Should cURL return or print out the data? (true = return, false = print)
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
     // Timeout in seconds
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
     // Download the given URL, and return output
    $output = curl_exec($ch);
     // Close the cURL resource, and free system resources
    curl_close($ch);
     return $output;
}

$addy = $_REQUEST['address'].", ".$_REQUEST['city'].", ";
if($_REQUEST['country']=="USA") { $addy .= $_REQUEST['state']; } else { $addy .= $_REQUEST['province']; }
$addy .= ", ".$_REQUEST['zip'];

$addy = stripslashes($addy);

$apicall = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=".urlencode($addy)."&sensor=false";

$ret = curl_fetch($apicall);

$decoded = json_decode($ret,true);

$lat = $decoded['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lat'];
$lng = $decoded['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lng'];

The code above was used after a form that received address input (capable of USA or CAN). Builds those variables in to an address string and encodes that for use by URL. cURL is used to contact maps.googleapis.com, then the returned JSON is decoded to a multidimensional associative array. After examining the array using print_r(), I was able to find the location I need in the array and write to variables $lat and $lng.