yum install php53-xml

or if you’re using puppet

package { ["php53-xml"]:
          ensure => present
        }

And finally, to get it to install, I used the below. I had to make it go to multiple lines to fit on the page but I have it all on 1 line in my puppet script:

exec { "pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de;
pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com;
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit  ":
          creates => "/usr/bin/phpunit"
 }

Well, I feel like an idiot.  It turns out there’s a great extension built into PHP to do just that, and it’s the DOM extension.  Using this, parsing HTML with PHP is just as easy as accessing the DOM using JQuery. (hint: very easy).

Lets say we’ve got a page our drive already.  For this example, I’ll use the homepage of this blog.  We’re going to parse out all the links.  I’ve saved the page as index.html and in the same directory I’ve created the parser script.

<?
$dom = new DomDocument;

// you can use loadHTML if you already have your string in memory
$dom->loadHTMLFile( "index.html" );
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

// grab all the A tags
// returns a domnodelist
$tags = $dom->getElementsByTagName( 'a' );

// you can actually iterate over the tags returned - 

// I'm not sure why they don't say that more explicitly

echo "Total length:"  . count($tags->length) . "\n";

foreach($tags as $t)
{
	// each of these is a DOMElement object
	// the value is what's inside the tag
	// the attributes can also be accessed
	printf( "%-50s%s   \n", $t->nodeValue, $t->getAttribute('href') );

}

Here’s a glimpse of the output:

vim                 http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/vim/  
virtual box         http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/virtual-box/   
vmware              http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/vmware/
weird               http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/weird/   
wikipedia           http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/wikipedia/
windows             http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/windows/  
xcode               http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/category/xcode/ 


Here’s another great reference I originally used to get started:

You can take this a bit further if you want to use the php curl extension.  Additionally, if you’re interested in using the advanced curl_multi_exec functionality, check out my previous post.

Edit: cynope on reddit suggested phpquery. I haven’t used it yet but it looks pretty cool. If I get a chance to try it I’ll post a followup.

This looks like a pretty cool tool to get a good idea of what’s going on in your PHP script without having to install tools like XDebug and Webgrind / KCacheGrind.

I’m not sure how this is anything new, tons of applications have their own volume setting. Quicktime, VLC, Windows Media Player.

Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to get out now. It’s essentially just a giant ad for Fox TV shows and movies.

Joel Downs believes Tivo should open an app store. I suppose if they are going to continue with their business model, it would make sense, since it probably won’t be long till the Xbox has Tivo functionality. It might already, but I wouldn’t know.

Speaking of an App store, Apple seems to be doing OK. The sad thing is I still haven’t thought of an interesting app to write.

Enjoy!

find . -name ‘*.php’ -exec php -l {} \; | grep “Errors parsing”

Fix by doing the following:

ntpdate ntp.nasa.gov > /dev/null

Edit: this is actually a reoccurring bug we’re seeing with the memcache 2.2.3 stable build on 2 different boxes
2nd Edit: Actually it was a bug in my code. I wasn’t setting the server and ip correctly, there was a typo in my configuration

php> echo urlencode(”test@str!ngw!th0u7\n”);
test%40str%21ngw%21th0u7%0A
php> echo urlencode(”test@str!ngw!th0u7″);
test%40str%21ngw%21th0u7

Basically, I’d recommend calling a trim() on any results you get back, unless you love newlines at the end for some reason.

If you’re using curl in your PHP app to make web requests, you’ve probably realized that by doing them one after the other, the total time of your request is the sum of all the requests put together. That’s lame.

Unfortunately using the curl_multi_exec is poorly documented in the PHP manual.

Let’s say that your app is hitting APIs from these servers:

Google: .1s
Microsoft: .3s
rustyrazorblade.com: .5s

Your total time will be .9s, just for api calls.

By using curl_multi_exec, you can execute those requests in parallel, and you’ll only be limited by the slowest request, which is about .5 sec to rustyrazorblade in this case, assuming your download bandwidth is not slowing you down.

Sample code:

$nodes = array('http://www.google.com', 'http://www.microsoft.com', 'http://www.rustyrazorblade.com');
$node_count = count($nodes);

$curl_arr = array();
$master = curl_multi_init();

for($i = 0; $i < $node_count; $i++)
{
	$url =$nodes[$i];
	$curl_arr[$i] = curl_init($url);
	curl_setopt($curl_arr[$i], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_multi_add_handle($master, $curl_arr[$i]);
}

do {
    curl_multi_exec($master,$running);
} while($running > 0);

echo "results: ";
for($i = 0; $i < $node_count; $i++)
{
	$results = curl_multi_getcontent  ( $curl_arr[$i]  );
	echo( $i . "\n" . $results . "\n");
}
echo 'done';

It’s really not documented on php.net how to use curl_multi_getcontent, so hopefully this helps someone.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./phpsh”, line 20, in
import readline

OK, seems easy enough. So I compiled python with readline support.

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/python –enable-readline

I change the PATH variable in my .bash_profile to point to the /usr/local/python directory first, and source’d it to get the new PATH settings. Still get the same error.

Usually at this point I’d like to tell you what was wrong, and how I fixed it. But you know what – I never figured it out. I just installed the python binary from python.org. And it works.

Sometimes it’s just not worth fighting the battle.

I don’t think it technically hangs, it just sits there with the data in a buffer waiting to be flushed.