Pulling Variables From Database

Recently I was working with a database and needed a way to have variables on each page but each page needed different content. i know this can be done with templating but I didn't want to have to import a big templating software for this one thing. I did a few searches online and after a while of searching saw mention of PhP's eval function.

It was a bit tricky to get working but here is the result:

eval("\$string = \"$string\";");
echo $string;

$string is the result from the database and can contain a string like "we have $variable1 for your $variable2!". The eval function takes car of parsing the PhP variable...very useful.

Thought this might be useful to anyone caring to read =)

Gmail's New Themes

So I originally heard about the new themes for Gmail and thought well that's pretty cool that they,re finally doing that. But I decided to check it out and the last theme caught my eye - Terminal. A little something every programmer can appreciate...



check it out by going to Gmail Themes and logging to your gmail account

Site Keyword Crawler

Recently I have been interested in PhP array functions and Regular Expressions (abbreviated as RegExp). I have found it is very easy to find the major keywords that are inside a string of text using the following code:

function getKeyWords($content){
 $tokens=explode(" ", $content);
 $keywords=array("num_words"=>1);
 foreach ($tokens as $word){
  if (!array_key_exists($word, $keywords)){
   //echo "word not found! $word
";
   $keywords[$word]=1;
  }else 
   $keywords[$word]++;
  $keywords['num_words']++;
 }
 return $keywords;
}

Basically it breaks apart the content into an array of tokens and checks for duplicates. As it stands this will grab anything with a space between as a token so things like 'alt="text' will be tagged as a token. Some modifications are needed for this to work on an HTML document like some fancy reg exp searches =). I will keep posting with any updates to this function...