My first post on PHP non-alpha numeric code was a bit brief, in the excitement of the discovery I failed to detail in depth the process. I've decided to follow up with a tutorial and hopefully explain the process better for anyone wanting to learn or improve the technique. The basis of PHP non-alphanumeric code is to take advantage of the fact that PHP automatically converts Arrays into a string "Array" when using in a string context.

He includes some basic examples showing how, with just a combination of things like "+", "_" and "[" or "]" you can reproduce similar output to echoing out an array and use that "Array" output string to get to other strings (like the letter "B"). There's also a more lengthy example showing how to build up the string "print 1+1" and have it execute using this technique.

With this post, we continue to explore the Regular expressions. The first post of the Learning Regular Expression series introduced Regular Expressions. The first post covers the regular expression delimiters and the "i" pattern modifier. In the language of regular expression, there is a special meaning of certain characters.

In this article they show the use of characters like the caret, asterisk, dot and dollar symbol to modify your expressions to handle special cases, matching for more than one character and the start and end of strings.

Suffice to say, [WP-Syntax] does the job fine except for one very annoying issue. Whenever you have any kind of special characters in your code (which you inevitably do e.g. <, >, & etc.), these always render as their escaped representations.

It only happens with the WYSIWYG editor for writing content (which the tool's FAQ recommends turning off) but there's a better solution that Alan found - change a line of code in the plugin to use the htmlspecialchars_decode function to rid your install of this pesky escaping bug.

In the last part of this series we looked at what a variable was in general. Today we'll be covering strings and text. We'll look at the contents those variables would typically hold.

Topics include the differences between single and double quotes, appending to a string and special characters (like line feeds and tabs). Code snippets are provided for each to help you visualize what they mean.

Next saturday (24th of January 2008) the Dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) will host an all day frontend event in The Hague (Den Haag). [...] And if you're not interested in learning more about Frontend development or if you're not up for having a good time with like minded developers, I'd stay away... Otherwise I'd suggest checking out the special PHPGG page for more details and if you reply to this post before Thursday night, 23:58 (UTC+1) you can win a FREE ticket donated by the phpGG (there will be a raffle).

Be sure you get your entry in by the end of Thursday (the 22nd) night to be entered to win the free pass. You can find out more about the event on the phpGG homepage or here.

Here's more from Stefan Koopmanschap's blog entry on the event:

I am quite excited about us organizing this event. This is our first step towards a full-blown conference, and I am proud of the speaker schedule we're putting together. We have speakers from Microsoft and Adobe who will go into their respective frontend and RIA technologies, Boy Baukema - the javascript expert at Ibuildings - will be talking about Javascript, and Robert Jan Verkade will give a take on HTML and CSS technologies. More on the content of the different presentations will follow as well as the actual schedule.

The event is free for active/paying phpGG members and will be 15 Euro for everyone else (for a pre-sale price, after that it's bumped up to 25 Euro). Along with the admission, this also gives you a one year membership in the phpGG.

More information on the event can be found on the phpGG group's website.

Seasons greetings everyone! The first of two surprises from us today is a great opportunity to combine our recent drop of all DRM protection on our PDFs with an awesome 30% discount on our single-issue prices to stock up on all your favourite past issues of php|architect.

This means that single issues are priced at (about) $3.49 CAD for a few days - all you need to do is pick your favorites from their archive, even their most recent issue.

I was finding a way to refer that element as a SimpleXMLElement and found a nifty note in PHP Manual. It says if you have unsupported (unsupported in PHP Lexicon for a variable name) characters inside the name of a node, you can access it using a special pattern {'name'}.

In his example, he shows how a popular phrase ("i can have cheese burger") can be used as the variable name despite having spaces in it.