BenEskew.com Just another web developer's personal weblog.

PHP Tips and Help

For those of you who do not know me personally or formally, here goes a bit of helpful information.

I'm currently 30 years old and I've been learning and programming with PHP for a bit over 6 years. In these past six years I've basically taught myself the language using books, ebooks, and the Internet as references and resources...and boy have I learned a lot. I wouldn't say that even at this point I am at an "Advanced" level of understanding/experience with PHP. I'd rather say that I'm around the "Intermediate" level of understanding with it. I know the true possibilities of PHP mingling with the other technologies, so I believe my "intermediate" rating for myself is almost even pushing it.

Anyways, here's some PHP tips I've picked up along the way or learned the hard way through trial and error experience.

1. Single Quotes Are Faster Than Double Quotes (STRINGS)

Irregardless of whatever rumor you've heard, utilizing single quotes when concatenating strings is much quicker execution-wise compared to using double quotes because when double quotes are used the PHP parser parses the string looking for string names to parse before returning the string.

Slower:
echo "$name is its name.";

Faster:
echo $name.' is its name.';

2. Absolutely, Always Sanitize User Data (MySQL)

The user of your web application is never to be trusted. Absolutely make sure to sanitize ALL incoming data from the User before interacting with it and your web databases.
At the very least:

Utilize mysql(i)_real_escape_string (PHP4.3+)
mysql_real_escape_string (earlier versions use mysql_escape_string) makes sure to add slashes for required elements, also making sure to combat many SQL injection attempts. You could also use other functions like strip_tags which further help sanitize and limit abuse of your User data.

Be Sure to Use htmlspecialchars and htmlentities (STRINGS)
Be sure, when you print data which has been submitted by the User back to the screen that you properly sanitize that data using the PHP functions htmlspecialchars and/or htmlentities.

3. The Ternary Operator Is Your Friend

If you usually write a lot of if/else statements with very few lines of code or better yet one line of code, using the ternary operator can drastically help your application by shortening the lines of code down to one and also helping the readability of your code as a whole. Take the following example into consideration:

if($aString == '1'){
   $retVal = true;
}else{
   $retVal = false;
}

Wouldn't you rather use the following instead?

$retVal = ($aString == '1') ? true : false;

4. Regardless of their Rep, Don't Completely Follow Other Developers' Techniques

You could completely disregard even me with this tip, but you really shouldn't follow other developers coding techniques without studying them yourself at least. I've learned this one the hard way by utilizing (embarrassingly) short if/then and conditional statements for a year or so without completely studying the side-effects of using said statements. Always make sure your chosen coding techniques are efficient and agile.

This is just a short list of tips and help I have to offer you about PHP. In the future I will continue this series of posts with even more tips and help with PHP so stay tuned!