On 2013-02-26 14:26, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 12:56 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
When people ask PHP questions, the questions tend to be phrased as "what
do I type to get X", and the answers come back that way too. The forums
are full of, "I had the same problem. Somebody told me to do this. I
don't really understand it, but it worked for me and maybe it'll work
for you too".
A problem that's majorly exacerbated by the myriad ways of doing some
things, with some of those ways deprecated and others theoretically
plausible but hopelessly impractical.
Here's an actual example that came up today at work. Suppose you have
a user-provided string that's supposed to contain a URL, and you need
to ensure that it doesn't have a trailing slash, so you can later add
"/foo" or "/bar". (Or alternatively, ensure that it DOES have a
trailing slash. Either works.) Start the timer, go find out how to do
it. Assume you are broadly familiar with PHP, and know how to do the
basics of string handling, and are competent at searching the web.
Ready? Go!
I'll wait for you to come back.
... Okay, some of you are back now. Just giving the stragglers time to
finish losing their marbles...
Alright. Here's what I found in a recreation of today's search.
Google search: php last character of string
http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php
-- okay, so I can use substr, but not string indexing, to find out
what the last character is
-- "Returns the extracted part of string; or FALSE on failure, or an
empty string." What kind of failures result in FALSE, and what kind in
an empty string?
[snip]
The page http://php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php says:
Description
string substr ( string $string , int $start [, int $length ] )
OK. It then goes on to say:
Parameters
string
The input string. Must be one character or longer.
What? The input string can't be an empty string?
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