Posts tagged Php

I needed to round the corners of a banner image dynamically in PHP and I couldn’t find any explanations. Anyway it turns out the easiest way is to make an image of a rounded corner, like this rounded-corner.png and then stamp it on all 4 corners. You have to rotate it each time of course.Anyway here’s a snipplet of code to give you an idea:

<?php
$banner = '/path/to/banner-image.png';
$corner = '/path/to/rounded-corner.png';

// Load up the images
$banner = open_image($banner);
$corner = open_image($corner);

// Round the corner
imagecopy($banner, $corner, 0, 0, 0, 0, imagesx($corner), imagesy($corner));
$corner = imagerotate($corner, 90, 0);
imagecopy($banner, $corner, 0, imagesy($banner) - imagesy($corner), 0, 0, imagesx($corner), imagesy($corner));
$corner = imagerotate($corner, 90, 0);
imagecopy($banner, $corner, imagesx($banner) - imagesy($corner), imagesy($banner) - imagesy($corner), 0, 0, imagesx($corner), imagesy($corner));
$corner = imagerotate($corner, 90, 0);
imagecopy($banner, $corner, imagesx($banner) - imagesy($corner), 0, 0, 0, imagesx($corner), imagesy($corner));

// Output the image
header("Content-type: image/gif");
imagegif($banner);

// Tidy up
imagedestroy($banner);
imagedestroy($corner);
?>

Working on this contract required me to strip non-ascii characters out of their content before sending it to Sphinx to be indexed. “No problem” I thought, “I’ll just use that function I wrote earlier“…

Whoops, to filter some test data it took like 3 minutes! So I did some further tests, here where my findings:

• strip_utf - 3 mins and 20.546s
• str_replace($crap, ”, $string) - 3 mins 6 seconds
• preg_replace(’/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/’, ”, $content) - 2 mins 10 seconds
• No filtering - 8 seconds!

So it still wasn’t fast enough. Finally I wrote a small chunk of C to strip the crap, piping the data through that gave:

• 12 seconds

Not bad! The code is pretty simple too, in case you want it here you go:

Wordpress has mangled the code so badly, I have given up trying to get it to display properly. View it here

Edit: Wordpress' gone so here you go:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void) {
  unsigned int Chr;

  while ((Chr = getchar()) != EOF) {
    if ((Chr > 31 && Chr < 128) || (Chr == 13) || (Chr == 10))
      putchar(Chr);
  }
  return 0;
}

Next up, making a module to use some C to strip these characters from within PHP..

(Also next Wordpress is going to be replaced)

- Dave.

(Thanks to erisco in ##php for the suggestions and help.)

Edit: By the way the time of 3 minutes mattered because that meant with the entire database the time would be like 5 or 6 hours, with the speed increase I managed to get it’s down to 20 minutes :D

Another quick PHP snippet, a function that returns the first integer found in the string given:

// Take a string and return the first number found
function parse_int($string) {
  ereg("([0-9]+)", $string, $results);
  if (is_array($results))
    return (int)$results[0];
  else
    return NULL;
}

I have been working on a PHP cotract recently and I needed to strip out anything non-asci.

Here’s a little function I wrote that takes a string and returns it minus all the crazy symbols:

// Function to strip out all non asci characters
function strip_utf($string) {
  for ($i = 0; $i < strlen ($string); $i++)
    if (ord($string[$i]) > 127)
      $string[$i] = " ";
  return $string;
}

Hope it helps, Dave.