As a freelance IT guy, I occasionally get cause to work on technologies I don’t usually mess around with. I last did any PHP work over 10 years ago so obviously I am rusty but a trusty google search provided me all the information I needed. Here are some of the useful functions / methods / tips i’ve recently used on projects.

Upload file using FTP

// FTP access parameters
$host = 'ftp.example.org';
$usr = 'example_user';
$pwd = 'example_password';

// file to move:
$local_file = './example.txt';
$ftp_path = '/data/example.txt';

// connect to FTP server (port 21)
$conn_id = ftp_connect($host, 21) or die ("Cannot connect to host");

// send access parameters
ftp_login($conn_id, $usr, $pwd) or die("Cannot login");

// turn on passive mode transfers (some servers need this)
// ftp_pasv ($conn_id, true);

// perform file upload
$upload = ftp_put($conn_id, $ftp_path, $local_file, FTP_ASCII);

// check upload status:
print (!$upload) ? 'Cannot upload' : 'Upload complete';
print "\n";

Create a unique filename

$ourUniqueFilename = uniqid() . '.txt'; // generate a unique filename with the txt extension

Exception handling

try
 {
 // do some stuff to throw an error    

 }
 catch(Exception $e)//catch exception
 {
 echo 'Caught exception: ',  $e->getMessage(), "\n";
 }
try
{
// do some stuff to throw an error

}
catch(Exception $e)//catch exception
{
echo ‘Caught exception: ‘,  $e->getMessage(), “\n”;
}

Speak to Simon Steed about any of the topics discussed this site.