Category Archives: geekout

on iPad and Android

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Not really what SJ presented

My first gen iPhone started showing it’s age,
so I got a Nexus One for continued tweetage.

Then Froyo was released, and with tether it came.
Wanting on 3G model, ’twas no longer my game.

So into the store I went, and reserved a tablet,
but with WiFi only, that’s all I needed to get!

Happy 2010!

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It’s the holiday break, and if you are anything like me, that means it’s time to print out a new calendar for the coming year. I use a one-sheet paper calendar to track when bills come in. This year I made it with YUI3, and I am passing the savings on to YOU!

Enjoy: http://daltonx.net/hacks/yearcal.html

Click the “2010″ at the top-left of the table to render a different year.

Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta

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Nifty New Insider

Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta (windows download) was released yesterday. It is a major milestone for the instant messaging team, and for me in particular because it means the new insider page is now live! This is the project I have been working on for the past few months. It is essentially a mini version of the Yahoo! homepage built with YQL cloud technology, complete with mail, news, weather, search assist, a high-revenue ad position, alternate stylesheets (skins!), a location picker, and there’s even an easter egg or two. Go find them if you can. ;)

The page is intended to run “inside the IM client” but it works just fine in any modern browser window, too. Check it out here (you will need a Yahoo! id).

XML string to PHP array

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UPDATE – the code is now on github

One common need when working in PHP is a way to convert an XML document into a serializable array. If you ever tried to serialize() and then unserialize() a SimpleXML or DOMDocument object, you know what I’m talking about.

Assume the following XML snippet:

<tv>
  <show name="Family Guy">
    <dog>Brian</dog>
    <kid>Chris</kid>
    <kid>Meg</kid>
  </show>
</tv>

There’s a quick and dirty way to do convert such a document to an array, using type casting and the JSON functions to ensure there are no exotic values that would cause problems when unserializing:

<?php
  $a = json_decode(json_encode((array) simplexml_load_string($s)),1);
?>

Here is the result for our sample XML, eg if we print_r($a):

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                )
        )
)

Pretty nifty, eh? But maybe we want to embed some HTML tags or something crazy along those lines. then we need a CDATA node…

<tv>
  <show name="Family Guy">
    <dog>Brian</dog>
    <kid>Chris</kid>
    <kid>Meg</kid>
    <kid><![CDATA[<em>Stewie</em>]]></kid>
  </show>
</tv>

The snippet of XML above would yield the following:

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                    [2] => Array
                        (
                        )
                )
        )
)

That’s not very useful. We got in trouble because the CDATA node, a SimpleXMLElement, is being cast to an array instead of a string. To handle this case while still keeping the nice @attributes notation, we need a slightly more verbose conversion function. Here is my version, hereby released under a do-whatever-but-dont-sue-me license.

<?php
/**
 * convert xml string to php array - useful to get a serializable value
 *
 * @param string $xmlstr
 * @return array
 * @author Adrien aka Gaarf
 */
function xmlstr_to_array($xmlstr) {
  $doc = new DOMDocument();
  $doc->loadXML($xmlstr);
  return domnode_to_array($doc->documentElement);
}
function domnode_to_array($node) {
  $output = array();
  switch ($node->nodeType) {
   case XML_CDATA_SECTION_NODE:
   case XML_TEXT_NODE:
    $output = trim($node->textContent);
   break;
   case XML_ELEMENT_NODE:
    for ($i=0, $m=$node->childNodes->length; $i<$m; $i++) {
     $child = $node->childNodes->item($i);
     $v = domnode_to_array($child);
     if(isset($child->tagName)) {
       $t = $child->tagName;
       if(!isset($output[$t])) {
        $output[$t] = array();
       }
       $output[$t][] = $v;
     }
     elseif($v) {
      $output = (string) $v;
     }
    }
    if(is_array($output)) {
     if($node->attributes->length) {
      $a = array();
      foreach($node->attributes as $attrName => $attrNode) {
       $a[$attrName] = (string) $attrNode->value;
      }
      $output['@attributes'] = $a;
     }
     foreach ($output as $t => $v) {
      if(is_array($v) && count($v)==1 && $t!='@attributes') {
       $output[$t] = $v[0];
      }
     }
    }
   break;
  }
  return $output;
}
?>

and the result, for our Stewie snippet:

Array
(
    [show] => Array
        (
            [@attributes] => Array
                (
                    [name] => Family Guy
                )
            [dog] => Brian
            [kid] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Chris
                    [1] => Meg
                    [2] => <em>Stewie</em>
                )
        )
)

Victory is mine! :D