Code in my Bug! » programming

Download PHP tidy extension for Mac OS X

Bipin Upadhyay — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:47:42 +0000

Yeah, I bought a Macbook Air

I cannot deny that it’s an awesome device and all that, but I’m still getting used to a new OS. The major work’s rediscovering the right tools and, of course, learning OS X’s keyboard shortcuts. Thankfully, it seems like a nice OS and all the work seems worth it.

by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mind-hacker/2726423319/lightbox/

That said, I now have a technology startup and cannot afford to just keep on ‘learning’. And that’s why small problems become big issues. All I needed was PHP-tidy to get on with life. Little did I know that it’d take up half of my day. So I’m putting it up here for people to download.

As most people, I got MAMP to avoid unnecessary complications and get on with “the code that matters to me”. MAMP is pre-packaged Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for Mac. My beef with the project is that they seem to be focusing on things that don’t really matter a lot to the target audience, like shiny-gui interface to configure document root, specify ports etc.. However, they seem to ignore few major bugs which seem to date around 2009.

They do not package tidy extension, even though there have been requests in the forum.
Their “pear.conf” configuration file’s broken, due to which neither pear nor pecl binary works, so tidy installation using pecl didn’t work either. The fix is a simple edit to the php_dir param though.
Sadly, pecl still fails due to some issue with phpize.
One solution is to compile PHP with tidy. However, there apparently is (or was) some bug with tidy, so I decided to avoid it and look around a little more.
Then, I found this post that recommends using pre-compiled php-tidy binary that comes bundled along with Zend Studio IDE. I decided to check it out, and thankfully, it worked.

Sigh! Such a crazy way to solve a simple problem.

Anyways, since tidy is an open source project, I figured it may not be illegal to put the binary up for download. (Zend Studio is NOT free.)

You may download php tidy for OS X (tested on Lion) from my public Dropbox folder.

HTTP protocol and other stuff that power the web

Bipin Upadhyay — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:38:02 +0000

Here’s a presentation that I’d delivered at a null Mumbai Chapter meet. It’d received pretty good response, so putting it up here as well

Proposal for a new Array Syntax in PHP

Bipin 3 Upadhyay — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:04:24 +0000

A new array syntax has been proposed (for quite some time) for defining arrays in PHP. Currently, we use array() construct to create an array. Some examples could be:

$myArray = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);
$yourArray = array(1 => “one”, 2 => “two”, “three”);
$herArray = array(1, 2, 3, array(4 => “four”, “five”));

The proposal is to use square brackets ( [ ] ) to define an array. If passed, we would be able rewrite the above examples as:

$myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
$yourArray = [1 => "one", 2 => "two", "three");
$herArray = [1, 2, 3, [4 => "four", "five"]];

There’s a good deal of discussion going on in the internal mailing list with almost equal number of people voting “for” and “against” it. Rasmus, isn’t not very supportive, yet has voted for the new proposal.

To be pretty honest, I am still not very sure if it’s going to be worth the trade-offs.
Anyhoo! Let’s wait and watch.