//To get the number of years old someone born on 28th Feb 1971 is on the 1st Jun 2012 use:
list ($yearsOld) = getAgeOnDate (1971, 2, 28, 2012, 6, 1) ;

function getAgeOnDate ($birthYear, $birthMonth, $birthDay, $thisYear, $thisMonth, $thisDay) {
	$yearDiff = $thisYear - $birthYear;
	$monthDiff = $thisMonth - $birthMonth;
	$dayDiff = $thisDay - $birthDay;							
	if ($dayDiff < 0) {
		$monthDiff--;
                // This is the difficult bit...
                // if the days crosses the end of the month
                // You need...                
                // The number of days from the birth day to the end of the birth month
                // Plus 
                // The number of days to this point in the current month

		$dayDiff = cal_days_in_month (CAL_GREGORIAN, $birthMonth, $birthYear) - (-1 * $dayDiff);
	}						
	if ($monthDiff < 0){
		$yearDiff--;
		$monthDiff = 12 - (-1 * $monthDiff);
	}
	return array($yearDiff, $monthDiff, $dayDiff);
}

Simply pass in the array, the array key you want to sort on, e.g. 

$customerArray = sortArrayByKey ($customerArray, "surname");

function sortArrayByKey ($key, $array, $desc=false){
    $sortArray = array();
    $returnArray = array();
    foreach ($array as $index=>$value) {
        $sortArray[$index] = $value[$key];
    }
    asort ($sortArray);
    foreach ($sortArray as $index=>$value) {
        $returnArray[] = $array[$index];
    }
    if ($desc) {
        return $returnArray = array_reverse($returnArray);
    } else {
        return ($returnArray);
    }
}

As a result I've written a couple of functions that extract database data into arrays from prepared or parametirised queries using the following functions

• mysqli_prepare
• mysqli_stmt_result_metadata
• mysqli_stmt_bind_param
• mysqli_stmt_execute
• mysqli_stmt_bind_result
• mysqli_stmt_fetch
• mysqli_stmt_close

If this page gets any hits, comments or feedback I'll add some more detail.

		
	
	dbConnect ($dbA);
	
	$unsafeInput = $_POST['input_field'];
	$userArray = $dbA->retrieveAllRecordsFromPreparedQuery ("select * from users where name like ? or address like ?", array ("%".$unsafeInput."%", "%".$unsafeInput."%"));
	print_r ($userArray); // use the array here

	$unsafeInput_1 = $_POST['input_field_1'];
	$unsafeInput_2 = $_POST['input_field_2'];
	$unsafeInput_3 = $_POST['input_field_3'];
	$userArray = $dbA->retrieveAllRecordsFromPreparedQuery ("select * from students where forename like ? or surname like ? or postcode like ?", array ("%".$unsafeInput_1."%", "%".$unsafeInput_2."%", "%".$unsafeInput_3."%");
	print_r ($userArray); // use the array here

	function dbConnect(&$dbA) {
		global $dbHost,$dbUser,$dbPassword,$dbName;
		
		$dbA = new dbAccess();		
		$dbStatus = $dbA-> connect($dbHost,$dbUser,$dbPassword,$dbName);
		
		if ($dbStatus == false && $showErrorOnFail==true) {
			exit;
		}
		return ($dbStatus);
	}

	class dbAccess {
		function connect($sql_host_name,$sql_username,$sql_password,$sql_database_name) {
			$this->currentDatabase = $sql_database_name;
			$this->resID = @mysqli_connect($sql_host_name,$sql_username,$sql_password);
			if ($this->resID == FALSE) {
				$this->lastError = "Could not connect to mySQL server";
				return FALSE;
			} else {
				if (@mysqli_select_db($this->resID, $sql_database_name)) {
					return TRUE;
				} else {
					return @mysqli_query($this->resID,"create database $sql_database_name");
					return FALSE;
				}
			}
		}
		
		function retrieveAllRecordsFromPreparedQuery ($sql_query, $params){
			if ($preparedStmt = mysqli_prepare($this->resID, $sql_query)) {	
				$paramPattern =  $this->getPreparedParamPattern ($params);				
				call_user_func_array('mysqli_stmt_bind_param', array_merge (array($preparedStmt, $paramPattern), $params));
				mysqli_stmt_execute($preparedStmt);
				
				$meta = mysqli_stmt_result_metadata($preparedStmt);				
				$fieldNames = array();
				while ($field = mysqli_fetch_field($meta)) {
				   $fieldNames[] = $field->name;
				}
				$resultRow = array($preparedStmt);
				foreach($fieldNames as $value) {
					$resultRow[] = &$$value;
				}
				call_user_func_array('mysqli_stmt_bind_result', $resultRow);
				$result = array();
				while(mysqli_stmt_fetch($preparedStmt)) {
					$thisRow = array();
					foreach($fieldNames as $value) {
						$thisRow[$value] = $$value;
					}
					$result[] = $thisRow;
				}
				mysqli_stmt_close($preparedStmt);
				return $result;
			} else {
				return "ERROR";
			}
		}

		function getPreparedParamPattern ($params){	
			$paramPattern = "";			
			foreach ($params as $thisParam) {					
				if (is_string($thisParam)) {
					$paramPattern .= "s";
				} elseif (is_int($thisParam)) {
					$paramPattern .= "i";
				} elseif (is_float($thisParam)) {
					$paramPattern .= "d";
				} else {
					die("invalid prepare type");
				}
			}
			return $paramPattern;
		}
	}
		

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, do you want to display the non-secure? 

Explorer shows an alert error which can seriously deter your customers, Chrome and Firefox are a bit more subtle turning the https padlock red in the navigation bar, but again this is pretty off putting to your customers.

The first thing to do is look at your source. All remote files should be linked relatively meaning they will be retrieved using the same protocal as the page (https) this applies to images, external javascript files, external stylesheets, iframe/frame content, flash etc. The only place you see http in your source is in links and forms e.g. paths off of your page. As part of this step mke sure any tracking you are using (Analytics etc) is also using a secure connection. If you suspect that a piece of code is causing the error, temporarily remove the suspect code and refresh the page, if the error has gone away you have found your culprit and need to see the documentation from the tracking provide as there will be a solution.

One thing to point out here is that the different browsers report these problems differently making it harder to resolve the problem is some browsers than others. Chrome especially seems to hang onto the error, caching it up (even after you clear the complete history) making it hard to resolve if the error is fixed or not. Explorer for once seems more reliable here, if the connection is secure - no alert, if its nonsecure - the alert shows.. therefore, for once, explorer is first choice.. However Chrome can be useful in reporting where the insecure content is. open the developer tools (spanner > tools > developer tools) reload the page, and the insecure content is listed.. usually.

Another way to trace the issue is to remove or comment out blocks of code. comment out the whole page the error should go.. gradully reintroduce blocks until the error comes back.

One thing you to be aware of here is redirects. If you have any server side redirects it could take you from a file on https to http without you realising. An example might be an image in your style sheet that doesn't exist and your server redirects the request to a non-secure error page. One way to find these is to see which resources are being requested then call them directly in your browser, if the url is redirected you have found your culprit. Chrome is very good here as viewing source allows you to click the external links..

The reason this issue is in my thoughts at the moment is I have just spent a couple of hours trying to resolve an issue that turned out to be an embdeded swf, the object tag had 'codebase=...' in it removing this stoped the 'nonsecure items' error. 

@font-face {  
font-family: yourFontName ;  
src: url( path/to/file/FONTNAME.ttf ) format("truetype");  
}

Once you've defined your font all you need to do is use it like you would any other standard font family

 
.fontclass { font-family: FONTNAME , verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;  
} 

As you may expect, there are a few caveats to using this. Whilst IE does support the font-face element it is only able to use "Embedded OpenType" fonts (eot). Not the end of the world, but you'll just have to convert your TTF to EOT.

@font-face {  
  font-family: " CREATED FONTNAME ";  
  src: url( path/to/file/FONTNAME.eot ); /* IE */  
  src: local(" FONTNAME "), url(path/to/file/FontFileName.ttf ) format("truetype"); /* non-IE */  
} 

Its pretty easy to run a conditional in the HTML and link to a completely different style-sheet for certain browsers. I personally don't like this solution as having the same styles in completely separate files is asking for trouble when sooner or later one CSS is updated and the other isn't and the site isn't checked in all browsers. This is especially likely to happen when multiple developers are working on the same files. Far better to have an if-then-else statement wrapped around the style inside the CSS, then its obvious what is happening.

Our requirement here is slightly different to a normal situation here as I could use our template engine to parse the file but the fundamental rules are the same and I've chnaged our code slightly to refect the more typical scenraio.

Part 1 redirect all of your filename.css requests to a server side script

I did this with an .htaccess script using:

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ /css_parser.php [NC,QSA,L]

Part 2 build a script that reads your css file and resolves the conditional statements

// set up an array to hold all of the values 
$visit = array ();
$visit["userAgent"] = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$visit["remoteAddr"] = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$visit["browser"] = "";
$visit["browserVersion"] = 0;

if (preg_match( '/mozilla.*applewebkit/([0-9a-z+-.]+).*mobile.*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent ))	{ // Safari Mobile
    $visit['browser'] = "SafMob";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif (preg_match( '/mozilla.*applewebkit/([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) { // Webkit (Safari, Shiira etc)
    $visit['browser'] = "Webkit";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif ( preg_match( '/mozilla.*opera ([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent) || preg_match( '/^opera/([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $aUserAgent)){ // Opera
    $visit['browser'] = "Opera";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif ( preg_match( '/mozilla.*rv:([0-9a-z+-.]+).*gecko.*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) {// Gecko (Firefox, Mozilla, Camino etc)
    $visit['browser'] = "Gecko";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif ( preg_match( '/mozilla.*MSIE ([0-9a-z+-.]+).*Mac.*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) { // IE Mac
    $visit['browser'] = "IEMac";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif( preg_match( '/PPC.*IEMobile ([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) { // MS mobile
    $visit['browser'] = "IEMob";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = "1.0";
} elseif( preg_match( '/mozilla.*?MSIE ([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) { // MSIE
    $visit['browser'] = "IE";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif( preg_match( '/mozilla.*konqueror/([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) { // Konqueror
    $visit['browser'] = "Konq";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif( preg_match( '/mozilla.*PSP.*; ([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) {// PSP
    $visit['browser'] = "PSP";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
} elseif( preg_match( '/mozilla.*NetFront/([0-9a-z+-.]+).*/si', $visit['userAgent'], $thisUserAgent )) {// NetFront
    $visit['browser'] = "NetF";
    $visit['browserVersion'] = $thisUserAgent[1];
}

Step 3: markup your css file

Although this is stored as a CSS file we can write normal PHP code into here and then parse it later with an 'eval'. 

/*stylesheet*/
body {font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif}
/*now we are going to wrap a conditional around our link class*/

    
        a.button {position relative; display:block; width 24px; height: 24px; background-image:url(../images/IE6_button.gif)
    
        a.button {position relative; display:block; width 24px; height: 24px; background-image:url(../images/button.png)
    

    a.button {position relative; display:block; width 24px; height: 24px; background-image:url(../images/button.png)

Part 4: finally we need to evaluate the CSS and return it the visitors browser

$pathToFile = "" // here you will somehow have to get the path to your css file, it might be that you only have one so you can add a static value, it might be that you need to get which file was called by using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] or something..
eval("$cssContents = "".file_get_contents($pathToFile)."";");

You now have the parsed css contents in a variable ($cssContents) and you need to send this file back to the users browser.

$expires = 60*60*24;<
header('Pragma: public');
header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMTn');
header('Content-Disposition: inline');
header('Cache-Control: maxage='.$expires');
header('Expires: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time()+$expires) . ' GMT');
header('Content-type: text/css');

print $cssContents;
exit;

That should be it, as usual any feedback or addtions would be appreciated, if you have a similar article post a link and if we think its relevant will post it here.

Z-index? What?

Think of each positioned layer of you design as pieces of paper. You can lay them one on top of the other in whatever order you like... using the z-index of course. The higher the z-index the closer to the top of the "paper pile" it is going to be. you can even use negative numbers to get the positioned element right down to the bottom. Cool huh?

Umm... examples please

Right, quite simply you will need to have some css positioned elements. These will HAVE to have the position attribute set. The z-index will work with either relative or absolute positioned elements. For example:

#container {
    position:absolute;
    width:100px;
    height:100px;
    z-index:-1;
}

This container will position itelf below the previous element. Use a positive number and the element will be above.
Easy Peasy!

Step 1 - The widget

Paste this where you want you're twitter feed to appear, we'll go into styling it later!
*replace USERNAME with your Twitter username

Step 2 - Javascript

Paste this just above the </body> tag on any page you wish to display the widget.
*replace USERNAME with your Twitter unsername

Step 3 - Styling

This is not the most flexible widget to style, but you can have a good go at getting it to look pretty good.

By adding this to your stylesheet, you can control the looks of the widget. Play about with it and have fun!

All you need to do is call the function passing it the parameters in the following order

$imageW = the width in pixels ot the output file
$imageH = the height in pixels of the output file
$imageIn = the path to the source image, this is the internal path not a url
$imageOut = the path to the output image, this is the internal path not a url this will overwrite anything alrady at this location
$method = how should the image be positioned, there are currently four supported methods:

• fit = the image is scaled so that it fits within the given sizes.if the image is smaller in both dimensions it is not scaled up.
• crop = the image is chopped off so that it fits into the box usually resulting in a loss of image in one plane or the other
• scale = the image is distorted and fits the box exactly
• custom = an 8 part array with custom specs is passed as the next parameter to precisely control the output. I use this in conjustion with a javascript driven cropper script. the array is in the form: x-coordinate of destination point, y-coordinate of destination point, x-coordinate of source point, y-coordinate of source point, Destination width, Destination height, Source width, Source height, 

$cropArray = used with the custom method above
$fillColour = used with the custom method above, allowing the background to be set if the specified position of the source image doesn't fully cover the target image.

Step 1: Make sure your server is set up properly

Put the code above at the top of one of your pages and call that page in a browser. At the very top you should see the installed PHP version. This needs to be greater than 5.2. You then need to make sure that APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is installed and theapc.rfc1867 setting is switched on. If APC is installed the phpinfo screen will have a seperate section called 'apc' and in that section you should see the setting for APC.rfc1867 and whether it is on or not. If any of these things are incorrect you will need to modify the server configuration or like me get the server support staff to do it for you. 

Step 2: Build the form

The form will look something like this

 its a fairly standard form except

• it submits to an iframe this is necessary so that the javascript (AJAX) can still run on the top level page refreshing the progress bar. When you have processed the form in the catching page in the iframe you'll need to do a javascript comand parent.location.href or similar.
• There is a special hidden form field called 'APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS' with a unique value. that you then pass to the progress script so that it can identify which file we are getting the server to tell us the progress of. This hidden field has to be before the file type field in the form.
  
• There a div that I called progressBar that we will display the progress bar in
• theres an onclick event on the submit button that we will use to start the uploader, we'll get to the javascript bit in a second

Step 3: create the graphics and CSS

Two basic classes a grey <div> with a red div inside it, we're going to set the the width of the inner one as percentage of the outer using the percentage passed back from the upload script.. I had these in my common CSS file though you could have these in the <head>. I did have some background images in here to make it a bit nicer but have kept it simple for this example.

Step 4: create the PHP script that reports the upload progress

Hopefully this should be fairly self-explanatory...

I called this script progress.php and kept in the same directory as the php file that calls it. We're going to call it in the next step in an AJAX command passing the unique upload key to it in a querystring /progress.php?uploadKey=xxxxxx This file will check the progress of the upload with the server and return the result back to the AJAX script as an XML file. We'll check for errors as we go and return some generic values in the event of an unexpected result. I'm going to pass only 2 values back to the AJAX script: an integer with the percentage of the progress and a pre formatted message containing a description of the upload.

step 5: Create the AJAX script to load and report the progress

This needs to sit in a javascript file, you can either have it inline in the page that holds the form or link to it in an external .js file.

soon