my php-driven thoughts

For long time i've been messing around with $_POST, $_GET, $_SESSION and $_COOKIES auto-global arrays, though typing $_POST['my_variable_from_form'] all the time (especially in encapsed or concatenated strings) isn't the biggest pleasure.

So i thought of a solution. I know that i've invented bycicle:

<?php
...
foreach ( $_POST as $key => $value ) {
    ${$key} = $value;
    /**
    * do any additional juggling with $value
    * like cleaning from unneeded tags, adding slashes 
    * or anything else you might think of
    */
}
...
?>

Now i've been listing php manual after some time and found a function that does all the job for me and is even much more flexible!

<?php
...
import_request_variables('p');
...
?>

More on this on the web: http://lt.php.net/manual/en/function.import-request-variables.php

Ok, so i couldn't leave this topic, could i ,)

Anyway, remember the sql query with IF?

SELECT id,title,IF(id=given_id,'selected="selected"','') AS selected FROM someTable

Now i added ordering (let's say country list):

SELECT id,country,IF(id=given_id,'selected="selected"','') AS selected FROM countryTable ORDER BY selected DESC,country ASC

Cheers!

P.S. Don't forget to index the table!

I'm sure most of the web-dev'ers and other type of dev'ers some days, months (but most likely years) ago were beginners and didn't know much about programming language they were learning.

I'll take my example.

Lot's of sleepless nights i was sitting in front of Melissa (my first PC, Celeron300, it was 1998). At that time it was kinda fashion thing to be cool (read: 1337), to use linux and be a hacker. Boy, was i naive... I don't remember now how many MBs i've read of tutorials and manuals like 'how to become a hacker.exe' (you can laugh now). Ok, so back to the topic. Coding age came to my life. First off i started with basic HTML (i think it was HTML 4.01) at that time i thought frames are cool. Didn't know anything about CSS'n'stuff. Then i quit it somehow (don't remember how).

After that came mIRC scripting. All summer nights i devoted to my (now)non-existing script NB-script (my nickname was NetBoy at that time, you can laugh again). IRC wars, nukes, ctcp floods were the rage (we didn't have fast isdn, dsl or broad band internet lines). I must say as a 'warrior' (now read: lamer) i was very good and agile.

Some time later a friend of mine offered me to become a web-developer. I knew html quite well at that time. Even started studying css. So a deal was like i write html and a friend of mine paints design. He's one of the best designers i, personally, know at the moment. And then it hit me. html & css with all design was left for my friend and i started to mess with PHP. After few months MySQL came to my sight as well (i wasn't confident enough to use it at beginning). PHP.lt (Lithuanian php developers' portal) started at the same time (it was round late autumn of 2001).

February of 2002 i took part in php.lt party. First party of web-developers. Got aquanted with lots of colegues, learned a lot (i was programming only for half a year, so i was too unexperienced to share my own thoughts).

I was doing lots of projects. Big and small. As i look back to my past projects i smile. When i study the code of my own projects sometimes i even disgust my-self. The code is rotten!

This term i heard first from my cyber-sister (she's native perl speaker, but for some reasons develop in Java). I didn't get a description, but i got the view. It's like when you develop a big project for quite some time and at the ending of project developement (testing-stage most often) you open project files which were developed at the beginning of the project and you see code which you wrote yourself, but now you just can write much more optimized code.

Is it only for me and my sister or it's just that i've improved my coding skills and such short term?