0plus1 Blog

Please note that this article can be applied to any non utf-8 encoding.

I recently needed to send data using ajax to an MSSql 2000 database (which requires windows-1252).
As you may know javascript sends data encoded in utf-8 (utf-16 to be more precise), this must be accepted as a fact thus making the use of a php function to convert the encoding before sending to the database. Here is the snippet I use:

function convertor($array){
	if (is_array($array) && count($array) > 0){
		foreach ($array as $k => $v){
			$return[$k] = mb_convert_encoding($v, "iso-8859-1","UTF-8");
		}
	} elseif (!empty($array)) {
		$return = mb_convert_encoding($array, "iso-8859-1","UTF-8");
	} else {
		return false;
	}
	return $return;
}

Basically what it does is to check if we have an array or a single value then proceed to convert it to the desired encoding (in my case iso-8859-1), after converting the values these can be safely stored into the database.

I have also to add that I’ve encountered some jquery plugins that messes with the encoding of the strings. To be on the safe side you may use this line:

unescape(encodeURIComponent(string))

We recently had to create a select reserved only to contries from the european union, here’s the array with the standard countries codes:

$eu_countries = array(
  "AT" => "Austria",
  "BE" => "Belgium",
  "BG" => "Bulgaria",
  "CY" => "Cyprus",
  "CZ" => "Czech Republic",
  "DK" => "Denmark",
  "EE" => "Estonia",
  "FI" => "Finland",
  "FR" => "France",
  "DE" => "Germany",
  "GR" => "Greece",
  "HU" => "Hungary",
  "IE" => "Ireland",
  "IT" => "Italy",
  "LV" => "Latvia",
  "LT" => "Lithuania",
  "LU" => "Luxembourg",
  "MT" => "Malta",
  "NL" => "Netherlands",
  "PL" => "Poland",
  "PT" => "Portugal",
  "RO" => "Romania",
  "SK" => "Slovakia (Slovak Republic)",
  "SI" => "Slovenia",
  "ES" => "Spain",
  "SE" => "Sweden",
  "GB" => "United Kingdom"
);

source

Today I wrote a script that needed to manipulate several multidimensional arrays, some of them pretty deep.

The standard php function print_r is an hellish mess, browsing through the marvellous php.net documentation I’ve found several examples to beautify the output of print_r (just to give credit: “Bob” and “Everett” were my inspiration) since no one actually did it the way I wanted I made a custom one myself:

function print_rr($array){
    foreach($array as $key=>$value){
       if(is_array($value)){
          $id = md5(rand());
          echo '[<a href="#" onclick="return expandParent(\''.$id.'\')">'.$key.'</a>]<br />';
          echo '<div id="'.$id.'" style="display:none;margin:10px;border-left:1px solid; padding-left:5px;">';
          print_rr($value, $count);
          echo '</div>';
       } else {
       echo "<b>$key</b>: ".$value."<br />";
       }
    }
echo '<script language="Javascript">
function expandParent(id){toggle="block";if(document.getElementById(id).style.display=="block"){toggle="none"}document.getElementById(id).style.display=toggle};
</script>';
}

Feel free to use it anyway you like it.