Talking about surprising and useful functions of PHP, there exist a number of technical functions apart from the basic ones which are usual and mostly known to all who claim to be knowing PHP in the most basic ways. These are the beneficiary that one can enjoy in PHP.
Like you could be liking implode() to join arrays together into a string. There are many more functions of such kinds that you can find more pleasant in PHP and which would be the part of further discussion.
Once you have found and used implode(), you may also love to know about explode() to do the exact opposite of your need. The two amazing functions alone are worth using in PHP Application, viz. date() and strtotime(). These can also be used in JavaScript-heavy apps (especially helpful in Node.JS)
Let’s consider some of the useful and various PHP functions:
fgetcsv() and fputcsv() – you can use this function constantly to get and put csv data in order.
glob() -“ it could be used for the return files that matches a pattern (e.g “/tmp/*.*”).
array_push(), array_pop(), array_shift(), array_unshift() – this function is usually used to add or remove elements from the either sides of an array.
array_reverse() – you can use this function for flipping the particular array around.
set_time_limit() – use of PHP via CLI all the time and updating the time limit(30) inside a loop assures that looping any amount of data could be done through manipulating.
spl_autoload_register() – it could prevent you from the nightmare of managing include() and require() statements, combining with PHP namespaces and some sort of code directory structure.
phpcredits() – used to print out credits.
mysql() – it is an undocumented mystery function, call it for yourself!
eval() – it’s a gateway to realms of wonder
These are some most required functions other than asort, ksort, arsort, print_r(), empty(), mail(), header(), etc. which are fairly helpful too. Most of the users are yet not aware about these amazing functions. Other than that,the magic methods _get and_set are incredibly useful.
The language in PHP comes with an integrated development server since PHP 5.4. Due to this competing innovation you don’t need to setup an Apache virtual host for developing your project, just enter into the folder in which your code is and type – php -S localhost : 8080.
The two old PHP functions strspn and strcspn are least known to the people. Basically they provide you with the option to search for characters in a string that are present or not in the other string. It is significant for parsing text without leading to split your strings in smaller pieces nor using regular expressions, helping you to write faster PHP parser. It could also be used for building fast e-mail message parser, HTML parser and filter classes.
Array Access interface is another function which allows you to access class variables as an array, which could be henceforth used to construct smarter Hash objects with consistent functions instead of using the plethora of array_functions. It’s also useful to template in MVC systems where you simply use PHP as the templates as well. The use of Reflection in PHP will guide you in solving most of the problems. Here you can inspect your big applications easily and can find the particular class or function defined, number of arguments, namespaces and so on.
In case you find yourself stuck while making the best out of any of these functions, you can always count on the support team of
Laitkor to come to your rescue.
