The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by PHP community member Sammy K Powers, has posted their latest episode as recorded live at this year's php[tek] conference.

We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.

Sammy is joined in this episode by fellow community members Gary Hockin, Ben Marks, Samantha Quiñones and Joe Ferguson. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio or video players or directly on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new episodes are posted.

The PHP Roundtable podcast has posted their latest episode recorded live at the Lone Star PHP Conference that just happened in Dallas, Texas. In it host Sammy Powers is joined by a big cast of characters: Chris Tankersley, Anthony Ferrara, Jeremy Mikola, Elizabeth Smith, Daniel Cousineau, Magnus Nordlander and Jared Farrish.

We record live from Lone Star PHP 2016 in Dallas, TX. We discuss what DI Containers aren't, tradeoffs to making things easy, how to improve your dev skills, repercussions of depending on Composer, PHP 7.1 features and we give away a white Confoo elePHPant.

Unfortunately the internet connection at the venue wasn't great, so the video/audio quality is a bit lacking. You can still watch and listen to the episode through the in-page audio and video player or directly on YouTube. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates when new shows are released (and when they're recording).

Christian Weiske had an interesting situation pop up in one of his applications around a call to a variable with an interesting name.

Some days ago I saw the following fatal error for the first time in my life:

Fatal error: Cannot access property started with '\o' in file.php

After some debugging, I found out that the source of the error was not some strange BOM or UTF-8 characters in PHP source code files. No, it was a combination of protected class properties, object-to-array casting and automatic template property mappings.

As it turns out, there was a change in how object-to-array casting was done in PHP 5.3 that made this break (related to things appended to private and protected variable names). He includes a bit of sample code to illustrate the problem - a simple class converted from object to array with direct casting. He does point out that it doesn't happen with get_object_vars, though, as that doesn't do the casting, just extraction.

Gareth Heyes has another post to his site on the topic of "non-alpha PHP code", this time getting a bit more into the process and how his examples are parsed by PHP into more familiar functionality.

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.

On the Refulz.com site they've posted the first part of a series about the basics of using special characters regular expressions (both in PHP and outside of it).

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.

Alan Skorkin has a recent post to his blog about a trouble that many WordPress users have come across in working with their content and the WP-Syntax plugin (for displaying code) - a special character escaping bug that escapes characters that don't need it.

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.

PHPBuilder.com has the latest in their series looking at beginner level PHP and some of the core concepts that go with it ("The ABC's of PHP"). This latest tutorial looks at string and text handling.

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.

Wanting to attend the phpGG group's "Frontend Special" event next Saturday (the 24th)? Want a free ticket to join in the fun? According to this new post on the Ibuildings blog, you could win one!

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.

The Dutch PHP Usergroup (phpGG) is having a special event at the end of January (on the 24th) - something they're calling the "phpGG Frontend Special".

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.

The mystery has been relealed - the php|architect folks have posted about their secret today - a discount on single issues of 30%.

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.