Defvayne23

 

Use GD: Part 1 – Crop Image

This is the first in a series of accepting a users image, selecting the area, and cropping it. First we will start with the guts of the process and build on top of that.

When letting users upload images for a site, you normally would like the images to be the same ratio and size. To do this we need to crop the image. To get things started lets select the image.

Now that we have the image we need to load the image into GD before we can do anything with it. You can find all the GD functions we use here.
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TCT: Crawl a Website

DISCLAIMER: I would like to say I do not condone doing this. Better ways, more legal, ways to get content from someone. But sometimes this is asked of you by your boss. DO NOT STEAL CONTENT.

For this weeks Thursday Code Tip I will show how to use PHP to crawl a website to gather content. First we start by selecting the URL to crawl:

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$sURL = "http://www.defvayne23.com/";

Next we get the content of the page:

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$sContent = file_get_contents($sURL);

Now to use REGEX to get what we want. You can learn patterns here. Below we search for the text within a H1 tag.

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$sPattern = '/<h1>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/h1>/i';
preg_match($sPattern, $sContent, $aMatches);

The above won’t return anything because I link all my H1’s. So lets modify it so it will account for the links, but not gather them.

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$sPattern = '/<h1><a [^>]+>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/a><\/h1>/i';

Now that we account for the anchor the above should return:

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Array
(
    [0] => Defvayne23
    [1] => Defvayne23
)

The first part of the array is the HTML it found including the h1 and anchor. The second is just the text that we where looking for.

Here it is all together:

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$sURL = "http://www.defvayne23.com/";
$sContent = file_get_contents($sURL);
$sPattern = '/<h1><a [^>]+>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/a><\/h1>/i';
preg_match($sPattern, $sContent, $aMatches);
$sHeader = $aMatches[1];

 

Link Wednesday

  • Uncrate – The Buyer’s Guide For Men
    A blog dedicated to what men want. Anything from electronics, cars, clothes, movies, and cooking.
  • jsFiddle – Online editor for the web
    jsFiddle is like services Pastie and Gist.Github, but will run live test of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Includes frameworks such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, and others. Great for that idea that comes to mind or helping out a fellow developer.
  • PHPCamp – Learn something new everyday
    A gathering point for great articles and tutorials for PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. You can also follow PHPCamp on Twitter.
  • Clients From Hell
    A great collection of actual interactions with customers. Love seeing the ones I can relate to.
  • Glyphish – iPhone icon collection
    Free collection of icons to help style your iPhone application. Currently has 130 icons usable on both toolbars and tab bars.
  • Mac Endeavor – Mac Applications
    Mac Endeavor have created 3 awesome apps for the Mac. From a Git manager to window management that saves an apps window layout.