Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet

Also, this serves as a useful reminder when returning to regular expressions.

15 PHP regular expressions for web developers

As I work with Automattic, the keepers of WordPress.com, I get the opportunity to work on the WordPress Platform. WordPress have their own standards that are sensible without being pedantic and are similar to the PEAR standard. The emphasis of the standard (in my opinion), is to present your code so collaboration is as easy as possible. It would prefer if you wrote code that is easier to read and understand, even if it is a little longer, than some compressed, ubersmart block of code that only you can follow.

Sometimes I look back at old code I did, like when I first wrote a WordPress plugin, and see places where it is not consistent with the WordPress standards… and I’d to get the itch to fix it, line by line, which is time consuming and dull work.

So I looked into ways to automate this in my text editor but alas no feature or option existed. While its not really possible to automate for all the standards, it should be possible to correct the formatting.

What can be automated?, well…

• Braces style. It should use K&R style.
• Indentation. Need to remove spacing and use tabs instead.
• Spacing. Add spacing to make code more readable.
• No shorthand PHP. So no <? allowed.

If you are using Coda, there is an excellent plugin called Coda PHP & Web Toolkit written by Mario Fischer. This is easy to install, and all you have to do to tidy your HTML, PHP, Javascript and CSS is right click on your code and select the plugin’s Tidy option.

The best thing about this, it meets WordPress PHP formatting standards with only a couple of exceptions. To fix them, you need to locate the phptidy-coda.php file, usually found here…
/Users/[your user name]/Library/Application Support/Coda/Plug-ins/PhpPlugin.codaplugin/Contents/Resources/phptidy-coda.php

If you can’t locate it, go to root and use the following search command.
sudo find . -name "*.php" -exec grep -H "phptidy" {} \;

The first exception is, that for functions and classes, it pushes the opening curly bracket, {, to the next line.
To fix this, open phptidy-coda.php in an editor and change the line

// from
$curly_brace_newline = array(T_CLASS, T_FUNCTION);
// to...
$curly_brace_newline = false;

The other exception is, it does not add spacing after a start round bracket (, or before an end round bracket, ).

In phptidy-coda.php, find the phptidy function and add a default for this formatting with the other defaults…

// Enable the single cleanup functions
$fix_token_case = true;
$fix_builtin_functions_case = true;
$replace_inline_tabs = true;
$replace_phptags = true;
$replace_shell_comments = true;
$fix_statement_brackets = true;
$fix_separation_whitespace = true;
$fix_comma_space = true;

//add new default in here
$fix_round_bracket_space = true;

$add_file_docblock = false;
$add_function_docblocks = false;
$add_doctags = false;
$fix_docblock_format = true;
$fix_docblock_space = false;
$add_blank_lines = false;
$indent = true;

Then look for the phptidy function and add a check for this default to format the spacing for round brackets.

// Simple formatting
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_token_case'] ) fix_token_case( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_builtin_functions_case'] ) fix_builtin_functions_case( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['replace_inline_tabs'] ) replace_inline_tabs( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['replace_phptags'] ) replace_phptags( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['replace_shell_comments'] ) replace_shell_comments( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_statement_brackets'] ) fix_statement_brackets( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_separation_whitespace'] ) fix_separation_whitespace( $tokens );
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_comma_space'] ) fix_comma_space( $tokens );
// Add in you call to new function here
if ( $GLOBALS['fix_round_bracket_space'] ) fix_round_bracket_space( $tokens );

Lastly, add in the function to format the code to add in spacing after the start round bracket and before the end round bracket where appropriate.

/**
 * Adds one space after a start round bracket and before an end round bracket
 *
 * @param array   $tokens (reference)
 */
function fix_round_bracket_space( &$tokens ) {

	foreach ( $tokens as $key => &$token ) {
		if ( !is_string( $token ) ) continue;
		if (
			// If the current token is a start round bracket...
			$token === "(" and
			// ...and the next token is no whitespace
			!( isset( $tokens[$key+1][0] ) and $tokens[$key+1][0] === T_WHITESPACE ) and
			// ...and the next token is not an end round bracket
			!( isset( $tokens[$key+1][0] ) and $tokens[$key+1][0] === ')' )
		) {
			// Insert one space
			array_splice( $tokens, $key+1, 0, array(
					array( T_WHITESPACE, " " )
				) );
		}
		else if (
			// If the current token is an end round bracket...
			$token === ")" and
			// ...and the previous token is no whitespace
			!( isset( $tokens[$key-1][0] ) and $tokens[$key-1][0] === T_WHITESPACE ) and
			// ...and the previous token is a start round bracket
			!( isset( $tokens[$key-1][0] ) and $tokens[$key-1][0] === '(' )
		) {
			// Insert one space
			array_splice( $tokens, $key, 0, array(
					array( T_WHITESPACE, " " )
				) );
		}
	}
}

Then save the file. You may need to edit this file using sudo in order to change it.
Restart Coda and tidy your PHP.

UPDATE:: Mario has told me that he will include these changes in a future update But in case it is not in the next update, you should make a backup of the phptidy-coda.php file, as the next plugin update may overwrite it.

UPDATE 2:: Mario has indeed included these changes into the lastest version of the plugin. He has also made the format configurable so if you don’t want your curly brackets on the same line, you can set it so.

Now that is all good and well if you have Coda, but what of the TextWrangler folk. Well the plugin for Coda uses an open sourced library called phptidy, written by Magnus Rosenbaum, which is impressive not least for the brevity of the documentation.

To get it to work with TextWrangler is fairly straightforward. Follow these steps and if I have left any out place highlight them in the comments below.

Note: I had to make some minor changes to the phptidy library to get it to work with TextWrangler. As well as the 2 changes above, I also had to suppress any text echo’d by the library.

• Download my phptidy library.
• Uncompress the zip file and copy the Tidy PHP.sh file to the Filters directory, you can find out how to do that here
• Open terminal and copy the phptidy.php file to your /usr/bin folder
• Go to the /usr/bin folder and change the file permissions of the phptidy.php by typing, sudo chmod 755 phptidy.php

Now you should be ready to try out the filter in TextWrangler.

At a later date, I plan to use John Godley’s CodeSniffer code, to validate the code and get a detailed explanation of where the code does not follow the WordPress standard.

Fiddler2 is a…

Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet

It works well with all browsers but most browsers have a decent built in debug console, so it is not entirely necessary.

However if you have the misfortune of debugging in the mixed up world of Internet Explorer ( a.k.a. IE ), you will know that in pre-IE8 browsers there is no debug tool available. Even for IE8, there is the developer debug tool, while it allows you to access and edit (to some extent) the HTML/CSS/Scripts in runtime.
However, it lacks the ability to see what requests are made and what responses you receive, which is essential data in understanding what your site is doing.
Apparently though, in IE9, the developer debug tool has added this capability.

The Fiddler2 tool itself looks a little clunky but it is powerful. It runs as a desktop application intercepting traffic between your browser and the internet, provides you with the data, timelines and statistics.

In a world of pain, Fiddler2 offers you some minor relief… thanks guys!

I never knew until recently that you can compare files in TextWrangler… and its easy.

Simply highlight the 2 files you want to compare in the Documents drawer, right click on them and select the option ‘Compare Selected Documents‘.

Now the 2 files will open into 2 windows with a review of the differences below them. You can then apply the differences in either direction.

Another tip is adding keyboard shortcuts to TextWrangler’s menu options.

I like to use the Search -› Jump Back/Forward option to navigate around a large body of code but alas it has no keyboard shortcut. So each time you wish to move from one Jump mark to another, you need to go up to the Search menu… which kinda defeats the handiness of the option in the first place.

Anyways, to add a keyboard shortcut to this (or some other useful menu) option, go to Textwrangler -› Preferences.

Select Menus…

Find the menu heading for the option you want, in my case Search…

In the menu header, find the option(s) you want to add a keyboard shortcut to.

Highlight an option and press the Set Key button.

Enter the keyboard shortcut and press the Set button.

Bingo.

Lastly, a while back I wrote a shell script to format my XML. To add a shortcut to this, you need to select Window -› Palettes -› Unix Filters

Select the script you want to shortcut and press the Set Key… button. Enter your keyboard shortcut and press the Set button and now when you want to format some messy XML, you have a keyboard shortcut to knock it into shape.

One issue that bugged me lately was when I opened an unindented, unformatted XML file. Basically, it looked a mess and there was no way to tidy the file up so that I could read it easily.

However, I found a simple way to do this today… thanks to this and this.

Simple guide
We want to add a UNIX script to TextWrangler so it can format an XML file… to do this, do this…

• Open TextWrangler and open a new text file.
• Copy and paste the code below into this file.

#!/bin/sh
xmllint --c14n "$*" | XMLLINT_INDENT=$'\t' xmllint --encode UTF-8 --format -

• Save the file, something like Tidy XML.sh, in the Filters folder.
• You can find the filters folder by going to the #! menu and go to the Unix Filters sub-menu, and select the Open Filters Folder, like below.
  
  • Now anytime you want to format an XML file, just go to this menu and select the Tidy XML.sh script and BOOM, neat tidy XML.

  

This is an interesting facility to extend an already great text editor, and I will be looking into more cool scripts that can hopefully lessen my daily annoyances.

UPDATED:: Added UTF8 encoding, thanks Rolan.
UPDATED:: Added a post to format PHP code in TextWrangler.

Basically, you can use a handy short memorable alias for a long and possible complicated one in terminal by doing the following.

Open terminal, go to root ( cd ~/ ) and see if a file under the name .bash_login exists… if not create it.

Open this file in vim, enter your aliases like so…
alias dev1=’ssh username@serverhostname.com’
alias dev2=’ssh username@anotherserverhostname.com’

So now each time I enter dev1 into the terminal, I will be ssh’ing into my server, or dev2 to ssh into another one without having to recall the hostname and such… sweet.

You can add as many as you like for any command.

HANDY TIP: Enter the alias !=history and now you each time you type ! plus some text, the terminal will  figure out which command to call based on your terminal history and the text you entered.

HANDY TIP #2: Use CTRL+R to search through any of your previous commands, you can insert any part of the command… super!
Thanks Donncha