Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_AS, expecting ‘;’ in /homepages/224/d19925234/htdocs/kdelli/working/index.php on line 18

The error is so descriptive! Well, more so than others, actually. When do you use the keyword as? In loop declarations! See my code.

if ( $query == "places" ) {
    $output = "";
    for ($locations as $key => $l) {
        $output .= $l . "\r\n";
    }    
}

What could be wrong? Take a look at the for loop declaration. Notice anything odd about it? I didn’t either, at first. The as looks right, I took out $key => but there was no difference. I realized, since I was coming from Java, that for each loops aren’t just for loops in PHP. They are literally foreach loops.

I corrected the error simply by changing for to foreach.

Two remarkable language features coming in PHP 5.4.

Array dereferencing, or calling a function and acting upon it directly as if it were an array.

foo()[0]
$foo->bar()[0]

In addition, a new short syntax for creating arrays akin to the JavaScript array literal syntax.

$a = [1, 2, 3, 4];
$b = ['one' => 1, 'two' => 2, 'three' => 3, 'four' => 4];
$c = ['one' => 1, 2, 'three' => 3, 4];

These two features will obviously make it impossible to be backwards compatible with older versions of PHP, but that’s really bad. Sadly, nobody on shared hosting will use this for a couple years.

The WordPress trac had a ticket filed that mentions PHP 5.4 and I mentioned its imminent arrival in the wake of a very specific host not supporting even the latest stable version of PHP 5.3 officially.

I wonder about the future of PHP.

PHP Version 5.3.99-dev

So, maybe we have something here.

I have yet to check if this really enables PHP 5.3 support or if just does something funky with the version numbers. I tested the .htaccess PHP-6 enabled directory with a little test script from the PHP 5.3 anonymous functions page.

// from http://php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php #example-1
echo preg_replace_callback('~-([a-z])~', function ($match) {
    return strtoupper($match[1]);
}, 'hello-world');
// outputs helloWorld


// from http://php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php #example-2
$greet = function($name)
{
    printf("Hello %s\r\n", $name);
};

$greet('World');
$greet('PHP');
// Hello World Hello PHP

When I test this without the special .htaccess, it spews a PHP 5.2 error, a function is in the wrong place.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in /homepages/27/d199890134/htdocs/dev/test.php on line 4

With the directive, I get lovely results with no errors. So perhaps you’ll want to try this out.

helloWorldHello World Hello PHP

It looks like we just found PHP 5.3, albeit in a round-about way. Again, I’m not 100% sure that this is true PHP 5.3 support and it could be that it is an untuned and sloppy trunk build that has loads of bugs and whatnot.

Update: June 2011

Maybe there is PHP 5.3 support on 1and1.

I wanted to use a certain wonderful PHP 5.3 framework for an upcoming project. I needed the official word on the state of PHP 5.3 on my beloved host, 1and1. I sent off an email to technical customer support.

Here’s the email I sent off this morning.

Hey there. I was wondering if it was possible to enable PHP 5.3 on 1and1 shared hosting servers? PHP 5.3 has been recommended since July 2010 and as it is a year later, 1and1 servers should be able to use it.

I checked my control panel and I can toggle the global PHP version to PHP 4, PHP 5 and something called PHP dev, but it is not particularly clear if PHP dev is PHP 5.3. I set my global version to PHP dev but my phpinfo() function still returns 5.2.17.

It would be really fantastic if I had access to PHP 5.3 because I may have to consider alternative hosting accommodations otherwise.

Thank you and have a good one.

–
Contract ID: xxxxxx; Customer ID: xxxxxx
–
Ryan Rampersad
www.ryanrampersad.com

Since it was Sunday, I didn’t expect a reply so soon. But here it is in its full unedited glory.

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting us.

As we had double check further, as of this moment, we only run php version 5.2.17. Our system administrator as still on the process of upgrading of php version to php 5.3 version.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

–
Sincerely,
xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Well, that’s definitive, isn’t it? They had to double check, but the system admininstrator is still slowly typing out that apt-get command to update to the latest version of PHP. But really, can I expect more from 1and1? With my blog slowly creeping up to the memory limitations and quite probably the daytime-peak connection traffic, I might be tempted to change. Or not.

So, please 1and1, get on this because I really need PHP 5.3!

define("LOG_FILENAME", "logs/%1$s-%2$s.txt");

That looks great and like it would work, doesn’t it? It does not work. Why? Have you ever seen a tutorial or some code written by some else using a $variable inside of a string intentionally?

 $name = "Ryan";
 echo "$name is awesome!";

That’s not right. It should be concatenated together because this is confusing. Is it printing $name or the variable in $name? None of the other languages I use do this kind of $inline variable inflation. It bothers me.

My code today was using sprintf to fill in the variables from the filename template established earlier.

 $logfile = sprintf(LOG_FILENAME, $user, $date);

After doing some testing and noticing that my log files were coming up as -.txt, I realized there was a problem with the strings.

I looked over my template "logs/%1$s-%2$s.txt" and saw the problem. The $s were uninitialized variables being treated as empty strings! To fix the obvious problem of interpreted strings, I changed them to literals. That is, with single quotes: 'logs/%1$s-%2$s.txt'.

That fixed the problem.

Let’s say you have two columns that describe two common pieces of data, first names and last names. If you wanted to order everyone by first name, it would be done easily by ORDER BY first_name. But then, if you wanted also to have those names in order by last name too? Easy. Simply add a comma: ORDER BY first_name, last_name.

But there’s more! For instance, if you wanted, you could order the last names in ascending order (A through Z) but have the first names in descending order (Z through A) like so, ORDER BY last_name ASC, first_name DESC. Each column can have it’s own ordering direction.

If you can add two columns, you can also add three, or four, or more. For instance, like the name ordering scheme previously, adding in age to further order these people is possible: ORDER BY first_name, last_name, age.

That’s all there is to ordering multiple columns in mysql.

I thought at first that this problem was an htaccess issue. So I headed over to /web/.htaccess. The docs in the file specifically say that if no_name_script doesn’t work, try the following line.

# uncomment the following line, if you are having trouble
# getting no_script_name to work
RewriteBase /

That didn’t solve the problem. I still received lovely not found errors. Those errors were not appearing when I used the front_end development mode, so it was something else. I had recently reinstalled my server and I wondered if that had something to do with it. I went to take a look at what extensions apache2 on Ubuntu was automatically installed with.

The big surprise: mod_rewrite was not enabled automatically! So after enabling it quickly with sudo a2enmod rewrite and restarting apache2 with the change sudo service apache2 restart, everything worked just fine.

You can of course, run off an array with a simple var_dump No big deal there, except you know, formatting and the verbosity of the indents, how many items are in each subarray and on. A more elegant solution is to make a customized function that can imiate the Java method, Arrays.toString(array).

This fulfilled my needs for a quick and easy array to string function.

function array_to_string($array, $options = array()) {
    $options =  array_merge(array(
      "html" => array("open" => "<pre>", "close" => "</pre>"),
      "enclose" => array("open" => "[", "close" => "]"),
      "separator" => ", "
    ), $options);

    $output = $options["html"][0];
    $output = $options["enclose"][0];

    $output = implode($options["separator"], $array);

    $output = $options["enclose"][1];
    $output = $options["html"][1];

    return $output;
}

The function has a few options, it allows you to specify opening and closing tags, defaulting to <pre>, also the opening and closing enclosure symbols, defaulting to square brackets. Finally, the customary glue or separator, commonly a comma. One downside to this method is that it assumes $array is not multidimensional. It would take some iteration or recursion to truly come up with a perfect solution.

500 | Internal Server Error | sfRenderException
The template “_paginate.php” does not exist or is unreadable in “”.

My assumption was that if symfony was given /paginate as a name for the partial name, it would get the hint that it was being stored in app/templates/. But that wasn’t the case, because the error persisted. I wasn’t sure if symfony could even do this, but then how could this super powerful framework not support including partials from the main template directory? Impossible.

So I looked up the documentation for the include_partial function. Well, it wasn’t found. Instead, doing a quick google turned up the PartialHelper instead, which was I was looking for.

It turns out that the include_partialglobal as the module name.

If the module name is 'global', then the partial file is looked for in myapp/templates/.

So, to include my paginate partial, I called include_partial("global/paginate", array("pager"=>$pager, "url"=>url_for("collection/index"));. That's all there is to including a partial in symfony from the app/template folder.

Happy partials.