There is your client, complaining that they can’t see the changes you just made to their website. You explain them that they need to delete their browser cache in order to properly visualize the modifications. They said they don’t know how, and this is when you lose your patience and decide for a more radical solution. We are developers right? there has to be something easier than explaining the client how to delete their cache. Read on for more.
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I was developing a website where people would place horse bets and the system should be able to calculate all the possible permutations based on the user selection. That means: finding all the possible combinations in a two dimensional array. I found a couple of functions but none of them would keep the array keys intact. So, I came up with this idea after a few gray hairs.
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Most of the time my clients need to download data from their database tables. Exporting to CSV is a pain in the rear for users and it leads to confusion (you know the colon and semicolon stuff). Today, I decided to make a very small controller that is portable and efficient for exporting full MySQL tables to Excel 2003 using PHPExcel and CodeIgniter.
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Reading Word documents with PHP on a Linux box can be a real pain. It requires DOM which is only available on the Windows platform. However, Unkwntech from Stack Overflow made quite a nice function to read Word documents and extract its information. It will only parse text content, but it is enough for most of the tasks we will be doing anyway.
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Yeah, it is a much discussed topic in every CI forum. I needed to set up a payment gateway and it was mandatory to receive the gateway response via $_GET, so I decided to do an investigation on the matter and this is what I came up with.
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We don’t like reading chopped sentences like “Star Wars Old Republic is be….”. It looks fugly. Usually, when trimming text you will go with substr(), but there is a much better way to do it, and believe me, you trimmed text will look so much better than before.
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It happened to me a lot of times, I had my connection set to UTF-8, my database was UTF-8, even my tables and every single field, however, for some reason, the information I updated in phpMyAdmin wasn’t being displayed correctly on my website and the information edited on my website wasn’t being displayed correctly in phpMyAdmin.

You know all those weird characters, those that very often come up when you write accented letters or words in another language like Portuguese or Spanish? That’s what I am talking about.

Here is the solution. A single line that can save you hours of research.

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I know there are several ways to accomplish this, however, of all the ones I’ve tried, this is the shortest so far:

$i = 0;
while(true)
{
	echo '<tr, td, div, row, whatever, here class="row'.$i.'">';
	$i = 1 - $i;
}

So, if you make two classes, row1 and row2, each with a different background color, the result will be alternated row colors in whatever you’re doing. Very useful for long lists.

Update: you might be interested in how to alternate row colors with pure CSS.