ob_start() – Joey Rivera

So, last week I attended our monthly Atlanta PHP meet and had a good time. At the end of the session some prizes were awarded “randomly”. Why “randomly”? Because a member of the group wrote down two names on a piece of paper and started asking the other members for a number. The two to get the numbers correct won an award. Now, this was a quick last minute thing for fun, so I am definitely over engineering this – but hey, that’s what makes programming fun!

The problems were:

(and I apologize for my honesty in case any member that attended the event reads this) I could see the persons hand movement while writing down the numbers so I already knew one of the numbers before starting.
The paper was lifted at some point before he started calling out for numbers and I could see the second number written on the paper.
It’s not truly random

Continue reading “Getting list of members from an event in meetup.com with PHP”

So every once in a while I want/need to write some code that may take some time to execute. The problem is because it takes so long to execute, I need to make sure to give the user some feedback during this process so they know the page is working. If I hit submit in a page and nothing changes in my screen after 20-30 seconds I assume something is wrong. For example, I wrote a php page that would query multiple users in one db, then for each user load their xml data from another db and parse out the information to return a report for all users in the date range. Depending on the date range, this could take a few minutes to complete. This is where the php output buffer comes into play. Continue reading “ob_start(), ob_flush(), flush(), set_time_limit() – Give user feedback during execution”