Suppose you want to store the information in array to your database. So in your PHP script, you may try something like this:

$cars=array(“Volvo”,”BMW”,”Toyota”);
$query=”INSERT INTO tablename (cars)  VALUES(‘$cars’);

If you run the script you’ll get “Array” as your value in the database. …click here to read more

While working with PHP array, it’s quite often to know what data inside the array. For this purpose we can use print_r() function to display the data contained by the array to the screen. But what if we are working on a program that run behind the screen such as remote connection program, application that calls the curl, or wordpress plugin that does not use a web browser. We need to write the output to a file, a log file isn’t that…?

Here is the trick:

ob_start(); //Start buffering
print_r($the_array); //print the array to buffer
$output = ob_get_contents(); //get the result from buffer
ob_end_clean(); //close buffer

$h = fopen(‘logfile.txt’, ‘w’); //open a file
fwrite($h, $output); //write the output text
fclose($h); //close file

Then manually open the created text file to see what happens…

For one or more reason it can be useful to automatically redirect visitors to another web page especially when the page they are trying to access is no longer exists. Using this method, they can be seamlessly transfered to the new page without having to click a link to continue.

To make a page redirection in php you can use the header() function and it is quite an easy task.

header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;

This function must be called before any actual output is sent unless you will get the following error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by

Or you can use ob_start() and ob_flush() function to avoid this problem by buffering the output.

ob_start();
echo “Test”;
header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/new_page.html’ ) ;
ob_flush();

Note that the code after the header function will still be executed, so to save resources you should call a die() function after the redirection.