Tomas Votruba has a tutorial posted to his site showing you how to update your Symfony application to make all of your services use auto-discovery rather than hard-coded configuration settings.

Do you use Symfony autodiscovery services registration everywhere and your configs have no extra lines? Skip this post and rather read another one.

But if you have many configs with manual service registration, tagging, and autowiring, keep reading. I'll show you how you can convert them easily be new Symplify package.

He starts off by talking about a few e-commerce projects he's been working with lately that define service configurations manually. He then mentions a package that's been created to help convert these over easily to autodiscovery rather than having to change them one by one. He provides the instructions to use this package and mentions some of the things that could go wrong in the conversion process to keep an eye out for.

Sameer Borate has a new post to his site sharing a method for converting a CSV to an Excel document using PHP. While you can open a CSV file with Excel correctly, using this method (and library) allows for more control over the end result.

During a recent data conversion project I needed to convert around 250 CSV files to Excel (xls) format. As this was a PHP project I decided to write a small PHP script using the PhpSpreadsheet library.

He then walks through the installation (via Composer) and use of the library to take in a simple CSV of countries and write it out as a .xls file in a single worksheet. He also includes a modification of the script that can be run from the command line, taking in arguments for the source file and the destination.

Tomas Votruba has a post to his site sharing a method for translating Latte templates to Twig templates with the help of the Simplify tool.

Statie - a tool for generating static open-sourced website like this blog or Pehapkari.cz - runs on YAML and Symfony DI Container. That way it's easy to understand by the PHP community worldwide.

But there are some pitfalls left. Like templates - being Latte the only one is a pity. Twig is often requested feature and one of the last big reasons not to use Statie.

Well, it was. Statie will support both Twig and Latte since next version. Are you a Twig fan? As a side effect, I made 27 regular expression to handle 80 % of the Latte to Twig migration for you.

He starts with a bit of explanation of how to the project started and his goals ("investing 5 hours to automate 30-minutes manual work under 10 seconds, so no-one else will have to do that ever again"). He covers the installation of the Symplify tool and how to execute the latte-to-twig-converter on a directory of Latte templates. He also provides some snippets of code you can use if you want to reverse the process and go from Twig to Latte.

On their Medium.com site Algotech Solutions has a post that does a side-by-side comparison of two web applications frameworks from two different languages: Symfony in PHP and Django in Python.

Many times have I heard the following from a developer: “I am scared to change technologies”, “I am excited but I’m afraid it will be entirely different”, “I only know , I’ve never seen any code in my life!”. Sounds familiar? This article will show you that different web frameworks are not in fact that different.

With the advent of open source software, modern frameworks have inspired each other in adding and improving features for easier and more efficient usage. I will try to explain the abstract notions under MVC Web frameworks and how you can easily implement them through any framework and programming language needed.

The article then walks through the basic setup and creation of a web application in each, going through:

• Installation
• Generating the sample application (Jobeet)
• Configuring the controllers and views
• Creating the view output

All of the code and command line calls are included in the post too. If finishes out with an overview of the similarities between the two frameworks and briefly mentions some of the differences (like when it comes to model handling).

Freek Van der Herten has an article posted to his site showing how you can use the Browsershot package to convert web pages to images with a bit of PHP.

Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I’d like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2.

He starts with a bit of history about the package and the recent switch from PhantomJS (a now abandoned project) over to Chrome's screenshot handling for creating the web page captures. He then shows how to install Chrome 59, the first version to include this feature, into a unix-based environment. Next comes the package and some example code of it in use: making a simple capture, setting the window size, manipulate the image post-capture and change it to grayscale.

Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site about another new library he's worked on (along with two others) to help convert PHP 7 code back to PHP 5 code - 7to5.

In the JavaScript world converting modern code to an older syntax is quite common. In the PHP world you don’t see that happen often. Symfony provides a few [polyfills](https://github.com/symfony/polyfill), but a full fledged conversion isn’t available. At the meetup of [our local PHP user group](http://www.meetup.com/phpantwerp/) [Jens Segers](https://twitter.com/jenssegers), [Hannes Van de Vreken](https://twitter.com/hannesvdvreken) and I were toying around with the idea of converting PHP 7 code to equivalent PHP 5 code automatically.

Today our little hobby project called 7to5 was tagged 1.0.0. You can view the repo on GitHub.

He starts by talking about what the library does to backport the code from PHP 7 to PHP 5 and how to install/use the command line tool. He then gets into things "behind the curtains" with a sample PHP 7 class and the resulting PHP 5 code. They made use of the PHP Parser tool for processing the PHP code provided. It does matching on certain element types and performs the token replacement. He gives examples of this with the null coalesce operator replacement and scalar type hinting.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to help your applications understand natural language with the help of the Api.ai service.

In this tutorial we’ll be looking into Api.ai, an API that lets us build apps which understand natural language, much like Siri. It can accept either text or speech as input, which it then parses and returns a JSON string that can be interpreted by the code that we write.

They start by explaining some of the concepts you'll need to know in using the service: agents, entities, intents, contexts, aliases and domains (each with a summary and examples). In their example, they show how to get the current time from any given places using their API. He shows you how to set up a free account and create a new agent. He then uses Guzzle (the HTTP client library) to make the request to the API with your API and subscription keys. They show the result of a query for "What's the current time in Barcelona Spain?" and how to extract the "location" value from the results. With this they then search the Google API for the local time of "Barcelona Spain". With the time in hand, they then use the responsive-voice.js library to convert the text to speech at the click of a button.

With all these concepts under your belt, they also walk you through a second application, a currency converter. It uses the same workflow as the previous example with the exception of using the CurrencyLayer.com API to perform the financial conversion. All code needed for this example is included as well. If you'd like to just jump to the end, they've also shared the complete code for both examples over on Github.

Barry vd. Heuvel has a new post sharing a method he's found for using StackPHP middleware with Laravel 5 and provides a library of his own to make moving between the middleware types easier.

In version 4.1, Laravel introduced compatibility with StackPHP middleware. [...] In Laravel 5, a lot of things changed. And with those changes, Laravel also removed the support for StackPHP middleware and introduced its own middleware contract.

As the two types of middleware have interfaces that slightly conflict, he shows how to convert from one to the other (a relatively simple change). He then shows how to use the middleware in a Laravel 5 application, but brings up a "chicken and the egg" situation where a wrapper for the HttpKernelInterface is needed for correct injection. To that end he created two simple wrappers, the ClosureMiddleware and ClosureHttpKernel handlers that can be used to simplify this middleware translation.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new post showing you how to create PDFs in a Drupal-based site making use of the Print module for the creation and formatting.

DF generation takes a slight change of mindset. As web developers, we have spent a lot of time convincing designers from a print background to stop producing pixel perfect designs that will be difficult to reproduce on the web. If you want to introduce PDF generation or any form of high designed print output, then we need to relearn some of our old skills we left behind. The nature of print means that it is precise and often needs pixel (or millimeter) perfect design.

He'd initially thought that the Views PDF module would be the natural choice, but after finding some unwanted dependencies, opted for the Print module instead. The Print module only creates the formatted output, though. This is then passed off to wkhtmltopdf to convert into final PDF form. He walks you through the configuration for the Print module and how to create some of the basic HTML structure for the resulting output. Next up is the addition of some styling and the process for exporting the HTML output over to wkhtmltopdf for handling. Output samples are included to help illustrate the final result.

Edd Mann looks at an issue in his latest post that caused him problems in a recent project, reversing a Unicode string with UTF-16BE/LE.

Last week I was bit by the Unicode encoding issue when trying to naively manipulate a user's input using PHP's built-in string functions. PHP simply assumes that all characters are a single byte (octet) and the provided functions use this assumption when processing a string. [...] You should be aware that in 'Western Europe' we commonly only use the basic ASCII character-set (consisting of 7 bytes). This makes the transition to the popular 'UTF-8' Unicode representation almost seamless, as the two map one-to-one. I wish to however, discuss how to reverse a Unicode string (UTF-8) using a combination of endianness magic and the 'strrev' function.

He provides two different approaches to the problem. The first he calls the "naive" approach because it corrupts characters needing more than the two-byte representation. His second solution, the "endianness" method, converts the string to big-endian first (UTF-16) and then back to UTF-8 for more correct handling.