On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

Evert Pot has posted a handy tip for Firefox users when it comes to searching the PHP.net manual for a specific function - an addition to the Quicksearch.

If you're a PHP developer, you'll likely often need to open up php.net to find out the [the order of ;)] arguments for a function. Generally i just type, php.net/functionname, but if you want to save 4 more keystrokes you can easily add a quick search.

He's included a screenshot of the interface to add it as well as the location to give - a URL pointing to the search page on the php.net website that looks in the "quickref" category for a match.

Davey Shafik has shared a method he's come up with for debugging directly from Firefox with the help of xdebug and the Komodo IDE.

In an effort to switch away from Zend Studio I have been trying out Komodo (again) [...] One of the last barriers to switching, has been to emulate the Zend Studio Toolbar for Firefox (also available for IE) which lets you do lots of great things, from Profiling to Debugging every page. I personally use it mostly for debugging single pages, and forms, as well as for end to end PHP and AJAX debugging - so this was the feature I was mostly looking to emulate.

He found his way through a few small additions to his php.ini file that allow Komodo to connect directly to the remote server and make debugging as easy as adding "?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1" to the URL of whatever page you're on. He's also made a bookmarklet that turns it on for you as well.

Jim Plush passed on a note today about the latest release of his PHP & Ajax framework, MyBic, reaching the 1.0 milestone:

I'm proud to announce to official 1.0.0 release of the MyBic AJAX framework. MyBic has been stable in production for months now with 0 memory leaks and 0 outstanding bugs known to date. MyBic has been successfully flying in some of the worlds top aircraft with 0 supervision in kiosk based devices.

Major advancements for this release include the addition of support for the Firebug debugger with a Firefox extension bundled in. You can grab this latest update from the project's website.

Today, Derick Rethans quickly points out a handy tool to interface with the PHP debugger package, XDebug via everyone's favorite browser - Firefox.

I was recently searching for sites that mention Xdebug and found a FireFox 2 extension that allows you to trigger Xdebug's debugger without having to use XDEBUG_SESSION_START as parameter. The extension works by adding the XDEBUG_SESSION cookie itself. You can configure which IDE key it uses.

The extension, XDebug Helper (currently in 0.1) makes the task of starting and stopping the XDebug debuugger as simple as a click of a button.

Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.

I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.

The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.

Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.

With the recent release of a new Firefox/PHP combination extension, several developers were interested in just how it all worked. One such developer is Terry Chay who has posted about it to his blog today after looking into how it all fits together.

The standard way of debugging in PHP involves just echoing shit to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an excellent way of debugging on the web. But what happens when doing this breaks your site?

That's where FirePHP comes in - it sends along a special request from your PHP script (as fired off by special code you insert) to include debugging information inside a different part of a "multipart/mixed" message. Terry also includes some of his sample code (including a custom version of the software) that he used to get things working. Check out the screenshot for the results.

As mentioned on dzone.com, there's an extension for Firefox, FirePHP, that allows you to get a bit more info on what your PHP scripts are up to.

FirePHP allows you to take a deeper look at all the work your PHP code does to generate that page you are currently looking at in your Firefox browser.

Just install the FirePHP Firefox extension, PHP PEAR package and add a few lines of code to your PHP application to get started. You will see a "FirePHP" tab in your Firebug extension to bring your PHP backend logic to your fingertips!

You can check out screenshots of it in action, a demo of its use, and of course, download the latest version all from their site. It works either as a separate window or attached in your browser and, based on an XML capabilities file, works with your application to provide details about your scripts.

From the Inside Open Source blog (from APress) there comes a helpful tip for those working with Firefox and PHPMyAdmin on a lower resolution screen:

I'm currently working on an e-commerce project involving a relatively small number of database tables. However the clients table consists of 19 fields, making for difficult data review and debugging within PHPMyAdmin, even at 1280Ã-768 resolution.

The answer is simple, at least if you're using Firefox. Firefox offers three hotkeys for changing the text size, and resultingly, the amount of text you can see on one screen.

The keys for this easy little fix use the Control key and plus (larger), minus (smaller), and zero (return to default size).

On the PHP Security Blog, there's three new posts that Stefan Esser has written up that demonstrate some of the more destructive uses of Javascript that he's found:

• JavaScript/HTML Portscanning and HTTP Auth
• Bruteforcing HTTP Auth in Firefox with JavaScript
• JavaScript Scanning and expose_php=On

While the first two are interesting, it's the last of these that most directly applies to PHP. He gives a simple "proof of concept" that checks to see if the embedded image is the correct "size" to be related to a webserver running PHP with the expose_php setting set to "on".