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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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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I needed to download some files from a remote FTP server and the store them in my website. The usual way would be to download all the files to my computer and then upload them to my website. In CodeIgniter 1.7.2 you would have to do this, however, the new CodeIgniter 2.0 has a new ‘download’ method that will make it real easy to transfer files between FTP servers.
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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.