Ken Guest’s online diary

I’ve noticed that Richard Heyes, who professes himself to be a php guru, deleted my comment on his “Some common regular expressions” posting which simply pointed out his expressions didn’t quite do the job and suggested a few PEAR packages that should be used instead of the expressions that he proffered for the following:

• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Telephone numbers
• Postal codes
• IP addresses
• An SQL date
• A domain
• A UK sort code

Why he deleted it is anybody’s guess – he deleted a few others too.

Anyway, for the record I thought I’d reproduce my comment from memory (I didn’t think to make a backup copy for obvious reasons but hey nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition).

The problem with just relying on a regular expression for validating data is there is no “defense in depth” to that solution. Sure the expression might catch the main bulk of data entered but there’s always going to be data that get’s through.

For example a simple regular expression for validating phone numbers won’t catch area codes or country that don’t actually exist and another that’s used for validating entered dates might not catch leap-year based exceptions.

If you follow these suggestions it should make your input validation more robust than simply relying on regular expressions and nothing more.

I noticed just now that Kae blogged about our participation at the Irish Web Technologies Conference.

As Kae mentioned, this was the first time that we represented the Irish PHP Users Group at any such conference and we learnt a lot – from the mundane to the slightly more insightful.

• Bring at least two [long] extension leads along rather than assume there will be power sockets nearby!
• Have Group business cards to give out – a few times we had to resort to writing the website address and contact/mailing list details of the Group onto scraps of paper; obviously not the best impression to give.
• Building on this, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to prepare some form of flyer that could be used to raise awareness of what the Group, and PHP in general, is about – a more substantial take away reminder as it were.
• And on top of this we need to raise awareness of the Group: I got speaking with David Ennis from TechWest in Galway and discovered that until today he had no idea that there was a national users group for php developers. We need to work on making ourselves known. David had some good ideas about this including having regional talks every 3 months or so. We reminded each other that the PHPLondon Conference was on today and for us to hold something similar there’s a lot of baby steps that we’d need to do before we can consider holding something similar.

It was a good day and I’m sure the next time we participate in a conference we’ll come better prepared.

It seems that my recent post about Date_Holidays has evolved into a request-fest for Drivers and Filters to calculate when the national and public holidays for various countries.

On the list to be developed so far are:
* Iceland
* Romania
* The Ukraine

Email me or leave a comment below if you are interested in this

Date_Holidays 0.17.2 was released today; with two new drivers and some bug fixes!

Date_Holidays is a PEAR package for PHP that is used for determining whether a specific date is a [public] holiday in some specified country, listing all such holidays and for these reasons is a useful component for scheduling applications.

This is driver based, one per country.
Currently there are drivers for: Austria, Denmark, England & Wales, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands (new) , Norway (new), Slovenia, Sweden and the USA.

There are also drivers for Christian and Jewish holidays along with special ‘UN’ celebrated days such as “World Health Day”.

It’s very easy to write new drivers for Date_Holidays, heck I wrote the Ireland driver So if you’ve noticed there is no driver for where you are I’d recommend that you do so.

Adam Harvey posted about listing which PEAR packages are installed. This inspired me to spend a few minutes coding a solution to check for a specific installed version of a package.
This is useful for where you provide a system that uses certain packages and you decide to not bundle those packages with the system you developed [so you don't have to manually apply upgrades for security fixes etc] and rely on PEAR itself to install and upgrade those packages as need be.

There were five attendants at this Wednesday’s meeting:

1. Fergal Byrne <editor@adnet.ie>
2. Justin Kelly <jk@tedcreativegroup.com>
3. Ken Guest <kguest@php.net>
4. Michael SÅ‚aby <michal.slaby@epsi.pl>
5. Stephen Curran <stephen.curran@gmail.com>

Symeon Charalabides sent his apologies, as did Barry O’Donovan – both unable to
attend.

We had a very interesting discussion about the different forms of testing:
Test Driven Development, phpunit, simpletest and the management/recording of
manual testing. CruiseControl and xinc were mentioned in passing.

This segued into chatting about maintaining existing code; the use of
php_beautifier and vim’s indent function for making code more readable and
phpdoc for generating documentation.
PHPCS was also mentioned and how it can be hooked into CVS or Subversion to
ensure only code adhering to the coding standards can be committed – much the
same as Fergal’s suggestion of hooking phpunit up so only fully tested code
can get into the repositary.

All in all it was a successful meeting; we even came away with a nice quote
from Justin: “Perl is nice if you want to be Harry Potter” (!)

links:

1. xinc – http://sourceforge.net/projects/xinc
2. cruisecontrol – http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
3. phpunit – http://phpunit.de
4. simpletest – http://www.lastcraft.com/simple_test.php
5. phpcs – http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer
6. php_beautifier – http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Beautifier