Category: php

It’s pretty simple to install phpBB from subversion, but I couldn’t find any instructions online, so I decided to write some.

Firstly, checkout the phpBB 3.0.x branch directory which always contains the latest stable code. You can do this with the following command:

svn checkout http://code.phpbb.com/svn/phpbb/branches/phpBB-3_0_0/phpBB forum

Where forum is the directory you want to install the forum into. Once all the code has been checked out, visit the the forum url in your web browser.

E.g. http://www.yoursite.co.uk/forum/

This will take you to an install wizard, which will guide you through the remaining steps. It’s as simple as that!

Have you ever wanted to display the contents of an array as a table in a command line script? If so, you will have no doubt realised that it takes somewhat longer than it’s html equivalent.

I needed to output some data in a tabular format from a PHP CLI script this week. MySQL does a good job of this with it’s own command line interface, so my first hope was that someone may have replicated this in a PHP function. After a fair bit of searching on Google, I still couldn’t find a suitable tool, so I decided to write my own.

Please note that it is not perfect; e.g. it will break with unpredictable results if the array you pass to it is not correctly formed. However, if you want a quick function that converts an array to a table, then this will certainly help:

<style type="text/css">

 * {font-family:courier new;}

</style>



<?



/*

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// FUNCTION: draw_text_table ($table)

// Accepts an array ($table) and returns a text table

// Array must be of the form:



$table[1]['id']       = '1';


$table[1]['make']     = 'Citroen';

$table[1]['model']    = 'Saxo';

$table[1]['version']  = '1.4 West Coast';



$table[2]['id']       = '2';

$table[2]['make']     = 'Honda';

$table[2]['model']    = 'Civic';

$table[2]['version']  = '1.6 VTi';



$table[3]['id']       = '3';


$table[3]['make']     = 'BMW';

$table[3]['model']    = '3 Series';

$table[3]['version']  = '328 Ci';



//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

*/



function draw_text_table ($table) {

    

    // Work out max lengths of each cell


    foreach ($table AS $row) {

        $cell_count = 0;

        foreach ($row AS $key=>$cell) {

            $cell_length = strlen($cell);


            $cell_count++;

            if (!isset($cell_lengths[$key]) || $cell_length > $cell_lengths[$key]) $cell_lengths[$key] = $cell_length;


        }    

    }



    // Build header bar



    $bar = '+';

    $header = '|';

    $i=0;




    foreach ($cell_lengths AS $fieldname => $length) {

        $i++;

        $bar .= str_pad('', $length+2, '-')."+";


        $name = $i.") ".$fieldname;

        if (strlen($name) > $length) {

            // crop long headings


            $name = substr($name, 0, $length-1);

        }

        $header .= ' '.str_pad($name, $length, ' ', STR_PAD_RIGHT) . " |";


    }



    $output = '';



    $output .= $bar."\n";

    $output .= $header."\n";


    $output .= $bar."\n";



    // Draw rows



    foreach ($table AS $row) {

        $output .= "|";


        foreach ($row AS $key=>$cell) {

            $output .= ' '.str_pad($cell, $cell_lengths[$key], ' ', STR_PAD_RIGHT) . " |";


        }

        $output .= "\n";

    }



    $output .= $bar."\n";



    return $output;




}



$table[1]['id']       = '1';

$table[1]['make']     = 'Citroen';


$table[1]['model']    = 'Saxo';

$table[1]['version']  = '1.4 West Coast';




$table[2]['id']          = '2';

$table[2]['make']     = 'Honda';


$table[2]['model']    = 'Civic';

$table[2]['version']  = '1.6 VTi';




$table[3]['id']          = '3';

$table[3]['make']     = 'BMW';


$table[3]['model']    = '3 Series';

$table[3]['version']  = '328 Ci';






echo 'This function takes an array like this:<br /><pre>';



var_dump($table);



echo '</pre>And converts it into a text table like this:<br /><pre>';




echo draw_text_table ($table);



echo '</pre>Handy for command line output!';



?>