On the TutsPlus.com site they've continued their series of posts introducing you to some of the basic functionality included with the PHP language. In this latest tutorial they focus on integers, floats, and number strings and how to determine which you're using.

Working with numbers in PHP seems to be a trivial concept, but it can be quite confusing. It looks easy at first because PHP provides automatic type conversion. For example, you can assign an integer value to a variable, and the type of that variable will be an integer. On the next line, you can assign a string to the same variable, and the type will change to a string. Unfortunately, this automatic conversion can sometimes break your code.

There are a lot of types for numeric values as well. In this tutorial, you'll learn about integers and floats in PHP, as well as the functions which can be used to determine the type of numbers that we are dealing with and convert between them. You'll also learn how to convert integers and floats to and from numerical strings.

The post starts by giving a summary of each of the types - integers and floats - along with the concepts of infinity and NaN. It then covers the use of "numerical strings" in PHP and the automatic type switching that can happen when using them with actual number values. The post wraps up with examples of how to cast values from strings to integers (and back) along with some final thoughts.

The TutsPlus.com site has another great PHP tutorial for those new to the language covering mathematical functionality in the language, from the basics out to more complex topics like trigonometry and random number generation.

Basic maths is used a lot during programming. We need to frequently compare, add, multiply, subtract and divide different values when writing code.

Sometimes, the maths required in a program can be more involved. You might need to work with logarithmic, trigonometric or exponential functions. In this tutorial, I'll discuss how to use each of these functions in PHP, with examples.

This tutorial will introduce you to the built-in math functions in PHP for doing trigonometry, exponentiation, and logarithm calculations. We'll also look at rounding and generating random numbers.

They start off with some of the "heavy hitters" in PHP's math functionality and how how to perform trigonometric operations with the likes of sin, cos and tan. This is applied to create an interesting dynamic image using the GD functionality. Next up comes the exponential and logarithmic functions with simple examples followed by a section sharing some other useful math functions for more everyday needs.

Hubert Brylkowski has written up a post to his site looking at recursion in PHP and some of the limitations that can some with traditional methods.

Let’s get straight into the problem – assume we want to calculate nth Fibonacci number. Definition : F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2) with seed values F(1) = F(2) = 1 so the most intuitive way to do this is just from the definition (recursive). [...] Yay, everything works, so let’s play with bigger numbers. I would like to know the 35th Fibonacci number. On my machine it takes about 8 seconds. That sucks and takes definitely too long.

He talks about what some of the issues with this normal recursive method is (including how many times the function is called) and a possible way to resolve it. He updates this to use the BCMath handling as the numbers are starting to get larger but soon hits the max nesting level for PHP itself. Instead of traditional recursion, he suggests using a few functions/methods to to "jump" from one call to the next without one having to call the other. He includes some refactoring of this solution and a bit of benchmarking to show the performance gain over traditional methods.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a tutorial from Phil Leggetter showing you how to integrate your application with Nexmo to be able to send and receive SMS messages in your Laravel application.

In this quick tutorial by Phil Leggetter, we’ll cover how you can both send and receive SMS from your Laravel application. We’ll do this using Nexmo, a cloud communications platform that offers APIs for provisioning phone numbers, sending and receiving SMS (which is handy since we’ll use that), making and receiving phone calls and more.

He starts off with some prerequisites you'll need to get the system working (including an account on Nexmo and their command line tool). They create a fresh Laravel application and integrate the Nexmo PHP package into it as a service provider. With that installed he shows how to send an SMS message to a phone number, how to "rent" a number they can reply to and receiving the callback when they send a response. The post finishes with the setup of an "auto-responder" that just confirms that the message was received.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Younes Rafie has continued his series about the PHP "Intl" extension for use in internationalizing an application. in this second part of the series he moves away from just strings and looks at using it for currencies and numbers.

The first part of this series was an introduction of the PHP Intl extension and of how to localize your application’s messages. In this part, we’re going to learn about localizing numbers, dates, calendars, and similar complex data.

The post is broken down into a few different sections, each with their own examples:

• Localizing Decimals
• Localizing Currencies
• Timezones
• Calendars

The "Intl" extension makes these operations relatively simple with plenty of built-in objects and methods to help with the translations between the formats. You can find out more about this extension in the PHP manual.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a post from author Nicola Pietroluongo talking about randomness in PHP. In the tutorial he talks about randomness, how it relates to cryptography and what's coming in PHP 7 to help.

This article analyzes problems related to random number generation used for cryptography purposes. PHP 5 does not provide an easy mechanism for generating cryptographically strong random numbers, while PHP 7 solves this by introducing a couple of CSPRNG functions.

He starts off by talking about what a CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator) is and some of the things it could be used for. He then moves on to the functionality coming in PHP 7 with the addition of the random_* functions for getting random bytes and random integer values. He talks briefly about what's going on "behind the scenes" of the generation and provides a simple code example with a randomized "dice roll" and the resulting numbers. He ends the post mentioning the random_compat library that can be installed for pre-PHP 7 applications that provides the same functionality just without those two functions defined.

The Paragon Initiative blog has a post from Scott Arciszewski about a new feature coming to upcoming WordPress versions - the use of a cryptographically security random number generator starting in version 4.4.0.

At Paragon Initiative Enterprises, we believe that security should be the default state of affairs, not something only in the reach of security experts. That is why [...] our team spends a great deal of time working to improve the security of popular free and open source software.

Today, we're pleased to announce an exciting security enhancement coming to WordPress in the next major version. Starting in 4.4.0, wp_rand() is cryptographically secure on all platforms.

He walks the reader through the "road" that's lead to the introduction of this support and the work he did in the past to help push the project (and others) towards it. Given that the WordPress project has a lot of emphasis on backwards compatibility, effort need to be put into a method that would work across new and old PHP versions. The random_compat library was created and was adopted not only by WordPress but also by several other major PHP projects.

Our part in this long and crazy journey has reached its end. In the course of fixing the same flaw in two distinct projects, the PHP community banded together to identify and expunge a bug in the PHP core, create a new feature in PHP 7, and in some small way helped to secure the CMS that powers more than 20% of websites on the Internet.

In his latest post Stanislav Malyshev looks at a RFC he's proposed to allow array keys to be objects including some of his thoughts behind the proposal and how he sees it being helpful to the language.

I’m going to put to vote soon another of my RFCs, namely one about “objects as keys“. So, I want to outline the case for it here and address some criticisms and questions raised while discussing it.

He starts off by answering the "why" question, mentioning specially the introduction of things like GMP numbers and how, despite them seeming to work like numbers, other things can be done with them. He talks about how you'd use this functionality "the right way" and how that'd relate back to value objects. He answers a few other questions about the proposal including why it's better than just using __toString or spl_object_hash instead. He spends the rest of the post looking at some of the implementation problems, disadvantages and some of the possible names (function names) for the handling.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post by Taylor Ren looks at big numbers in PHP and the functionality it has to handle arbitrary precision via three modules - GMP. BC Math and php-bignumbers.

In this article, we will review the PHP capability to provide arbitrary precision number calculation / big integer calculation by reviewing 3 PHP modules: GMP, BC Math and php-bignumbers. We will demonstrate two real-world examples to see the powers/limitations of each. The first one will be calculating PI to arbitrary precision – well, for the sake of the article, we will restrict the precision, say, to 1000 digits; the second will be a simple demonstration on RSA encryption/decryption.

He briefly looks at how to get the tools installed (via at-get or Composer) and a sample script to ensure that they're all included correctly and working. He includes a comparison between the three libraries, listing both strengths and weaknesses relative to the others. He then gets a bit more in-depth and shows how to calculate PI with each option (code is on GitHub) and the results of the benchmarking. He also includes a second example of calculating the RSA algorithm based on their process.

Timoh has posted a look at random number generation to his site, focusing on one of the many methods to produce truly random number - using /dev/(u)random (available on Unix-based filesystems).

How would you gather cryptographically secure random bytes in your PHP application? This is actually quite a good question. It used to be, and seems, it still is not that uncommon to just simply call mt_rand() function to get the job done creating user’s “initial password”, for example. A bit more experienced reader will notice there is a security bug. [...] But actually only a few [functions to get random values] can be recommended for security sensitive purposes. And now I’m not talking about openssl_random_pseudo_bytes().

He starts with a look at openssl_random_pseudo_bytes and why there might be something wrong with its use - mainly that OpenSSL has had its own share of security issues in the past. Of the two random resources he recommends /dev/urandom as it's less blocking and more useful for web applications. He recommends the RandomCompat library if you need to take this random data and transform it into integers (with one caveat).