Here is a code to detect weather the visitor if your webpage is using ie or not:

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if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && 
    (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false)) 
	{
	echo "You are using ie";
	}  
	else { 
	echo "You are not using ie"; 
	}

I am using this simple PHP code while developing HybridPass, a new authentication tool for web applications. My Javascript is only compatible with ie at the moment, so until I develop it more to support other browsers it is important to give my visitors the right feedback.

array_rand can be used to select a list of values randomly. This helped me to code a server side script to display a random grid of pictures as part of a project. These pictures changes every time the page is requested or refreshed.

Below is an example:

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<?php
srand((float) microtime() * 10000000);
$input = array("lion.gif", "cat.gif", "dog.gif", "bird.gif", 
"tiger.gif", "eagle.gif");
$rand_keys = array_rand($input, 4);
?>
 
<table align="center" cellspacing="15">
<tr>
<td  bgcolor="#f0f0f0" align="middle">
<img src="<?php echo $input[$rand_keys[0]] ?>">
</td>
<td  bgcolor="#f0f0f0" align="middle">
<img src="<?php echo $input[$rand_keys[1]] ?>">
</tr>
<tr>
<td  bgcolor="#f0f0f0" align="middle">
<img src="<?php echo $input[$rand_keys[2]] ?>">
</td>
<td  bgcolor="#f0f0f0" align="middle">
<img src="<?php echo $input[$rand_keys[3]] ?>">
</tr>
</table>

]]> http://blog.creativeitp.com/posts-and-articles/php/display-generate-random-values-array_rand/feed/ 0 http://blog.creativeitp.com/posts-and-articles/phpbb/retrieve-data-as-utf-8-from-mysql-db/ http://blog.creativeitp.com/posts-and-articles/phpbb/retrieve-data-as-utf-8-from-mysql-db/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:43:39 +0000 Haider al-Khateeb http://blog.creativeitp.com/?p=100

Charset Problem

The image above is showing part of a small hack I coded for a phpBB board to show topics from selected sections. Those question marks were suppose to be Arabic letters, but after a recent update to phpBB the hack failed to use the board config file to connect so I had to set up my own direct connection to the DB.

The connection was fine, but I got “?????” instead of something I can read in Arabic. After some tests I figured out, though the MySQL DB is using UTF-8 as a character set, which means it can handle the language efficiently, I had to set the character set to UTF-8 via PHP for every query using the following code:

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mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");

What is even better is setting the character set at once with a single line of code for the whole connection by using the following code:

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mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $db);

This code should be used directly after the connection, as in the following example:

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 $db = mysql_connect('localhost','DB_USER','DB_PASSWORD') 
or die("Could not connect");
 
mysql_select_db('DB_NAME',$db) or die("Could not connect"); 
 
  // Set character set to UTF-8
  //
  mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $db);

Now I got my topics in readable Arabic once again!

Charset Problem Solved

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