$xml = simplexml_load_file('path_to_the_file');

Sometimes you’d need to dump or save the entire XML as a string, but there’s no toString method! As you can see $xml is an instance of the SimpleXMLElement class.

var_dump($xml); // object(SimpleXMLElement)...

Actually if you take a closer look:

$xml->toString();

will return “Call to an undefined method toString()”, which is frustrating because the developers community is used to use toString() when converting an object into a string.

The solution

In fact there’s a method doing exactly what’s needed. This is SimpleXMLElement::asXML

As described in the manual page: “SimpleXMLElement::asXML — Return a well-formed XML string based on SimpleXML element” [2].

Besides that it does exactly what’s needed it sounds irrelevant, because you’ve an XML object and the name “asXML” doesn’t describe correctly what’s expected.

$xml->asXML() // ?!

1. SimpleXMLElement::asXML
2. SimpleXML Introduction

You’ve definitely seen the “share a link” screen in Facebook. When you paste a link into the box (fig. 1) and press the “Attach” button you’ll get the prompted cite parsed with a title, description and possibly thumb (fig. 2). This functionality is well known in Facebook, but it appears to be well known also in various social services. In fact Linkedin, Reddit, Dzone‘s bookmarklet use it.

Fist thing to notice is that this information, prompted by Facebook, is the same as the meta tag information. However there is a slight difference.

Facebook prefers for the thumb the image set into the <meta property=”og:image” … />. In the case above this tag appears to be:

And the image pointed in the SRC attribute is exactly the same as the one prompted by Facebook (fig. 3).

First thing to note is that the real thumb is bigger than the thumb shown in Facebook, so Facebook resizes it and the second thing to note is that there are more meta tags of the og:… format.

Meta Tags and The Open Graph Protocol

By default meta tags contain various information about the web page. They are not visible in the webpage, but contain some info about it. The most common meta tags are the title, description and keywords tags. They of course contain the title of the page, not that this can be different from the <title> tag, a short description of the page and some keywords describing the content of the page. They are well known also because the search engines make use of them when trying to collect information about the page and the process of SEO passes through it.

However the default HTML meta tags cannot contain everything. Thus for example you cannot point the preferable thumbnail for a webpage. The solution is the Open Graph Protocol. It comes with meta tags that can contain more and more valuable info. Such a tag is the og:image meta tag. Note that all the Open Graph (og) meta tags are defined by the og: prefix before the entity name. Thus og:image comes for images, while og:longitude for geo positioning.

That’s really useful, but how you can read them?

PHP, Meta Tags and Regexps

When you try to read information from a webpage source the first possible path is by using regular expressions. However PHP is smart enough to offer you some useful functions. Such a function is get_meta_tags(). As you may guess this method reads the meta tags by given URL.

$a = get_meta_tags('http://vimeo.com/10758212');
var_dump($a);

However this method can’t read Open Graph tags. So finally you’ve to use some regexps.

preg_match('//', $source, $matches);

Now you can grab the og:image tag. And even more – grab every image (<img>) from that page.

preg_match_all('/

Related posts:

How to Sanitize User Input in PHP? 
HTML Tags: <base> 
Automatically Upload Images with PHP Directly from the URI 
Download Images with PHP 


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		Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:11:48 +0000
		
				
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		

		/?p=2160
		Continue reading Wanted – onfocus/onblur. Why They Don’t Work Always! →


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How to Sanitize User Input in PHP? 
jQuery live() vs bind() performance 
2xjQuery: Select a Selector 
Google Closure Compiler doesn’t work?! 


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				On Focus

Perhaps you think of onfocus and onblur events as a default behavior existing in any web page. This is not quite true! Onfocurs and onblur are well known in web developing (js) and are fired, of course, when the user tries to point something or leaves some element. Onfocurs is fired when the user either goes to an element with the Tab button on with the mouse. When the element is on focus, evidently, the onfocus event is fired. Actually you can see which element is on focus, like an anchor or input, when the element is outlined by the browser by default. In the same scenario, when some element has been on focus and than the user switches to another element, the onblur event is fired. Thus you may guess that this element is no longer on focus.
This in general are the onfocus/onblur events. The interesting part is that by default are known as built-in events in every page, but that is wrong.
Where Are My Events?
A typical use case is to take the code from some web page, where you’re sure this works perfectly, you can focus and blur element with no obstacle, but once you paste it inside your markup everything’s going wrong. Imagine you’ve the following markup (a typical search box text):


This works perfectly until you paste it to your site. And than nothing works correctly. Why? Where’s the problem?
Make Them Work
Actually the problem isn’t hiding somewhere in the markup above. It’s in the HTML definition. There are lots of web pages using strict HTML definition, that looks like this:



	...


	...

while you’ve to use the pure HTML definition to make onfocus/onblur work.
You’ve to switch to:


	...


	...

Than you can continue using these useful events!

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How to Sanitize User Input in PHP? 
jQuery live() vs bind() performance 
2xjQuery: Select a Selector 
Google Closure Compiler doesn’t work?! 


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		Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:33:56 +0000
		
				
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		

		/?p=1660
		Continue reading jQuery: Get the Selected Option Text →


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				What’s the Task?
First of all let me explain what is the task. If there’s a select menu with several options, each of which are with a given value attribute, the task is to get the text into the option tag, and not that of the value attribute.
In that scenario let’s assume that we have the following HTML:

    value 1
    value 2




Note that in the official jQuery doc page, the selector is described in the same context, but with a different markup:

    value 1
    value 2


than the jQuery snippet looks like that:
$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#my-select").change(function() {
        alert($(this).val());
    });
});

Here’s interesting to note that there’s no value attribute set to the options, thus the selection of an element is correct and the returned value is correct. The problem is that this code doesn’t work correctly once you’ve a different value attribute, from the value enclosed into the option tag. In our case we’ve the markup shown on the first code snippet and we’d like to get the “value 2” string instead of “2”.


Source Code

    value 1
    value 2


$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#my-select").change(function() {
        alert($(this).val());
    });
});

Solution
Finally the solution, is pretty simple and clear, but this time is not to so “native” and it’s definitely something you couldn’t expect! The only thing you’ve to do is to change the selector!
$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#my-select).change(function() {
        alert($('#my-select option:selected').html());
    });
});


Related posts:

jQuery: Setting Up a Vector Path Fill Color 
jQuery.unbind() 
jQuery tooltip plugin! 
jQuery: what about this.title? 


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		Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:03:26 +0000
		
				
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		

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		Continue reading How to Sanitize User Input in PHP? →


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				It’s a question almost every PHP developer asks yourself. By me the most simple way to sanitize the user input is to save everything in the database with no loosing of tags or whatever HTML markup and than on displaying this on the client side to strip_tags if needed.

In example when saving a HTML formatted text you can use simply the htmlspecialchars method
$description = htmlspecialchars($_POST['description']);
Than you can be sure everything’s in the database, but it’s not actually HTML. Thus you don’t have any tags at all in the database field.
When you show this in the client side and you’d like to strip some tags, i.e. to keep only the <a> tag you can do this:
echo strip_tags(htmlspecialchars_decode($description), '<a>');
That’s the most simple way to keep everything as the original source. By me it’s better to keep whatever HTML markup there is on the input.

Related posts:

How to Collect the Images and Meta Tags from a Webpage with PHP 
Automatically Upload Images with PHP Directly from the URI 
PHP if-else-endif Statements 
Wanted – onfocus/onblur. Why They Don’t Work Always! 


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