.josh

well levenshtein() is a lot more efficient at doing the same thing, and translating the result into a % is trivial.. I suppose if you're just comparing single words you aren't going to even come close to noticing the difference in efficiency, so sure, go for the similar_text and skip the extra step of translating it into %

I wanted to post this on the main site as a blog but the responses here confirmed my suspicions that the quality is less than ideal. You know what they say...when you post shit, the flies start buzzing...

You forgot to prefix that with "Dear Diary..."

I'm actually more of a pig. At least, that's what the ladies keep calling me, right before they slap me...

...so...you don't see something between two periods?

any errant whitespace in the include? I notice a blank line in the source of 2nd page...

Can't tell you what's wrong without (relevant) code being posted. Post what you have attempted so far and why it's not working (error messages, etc..)

well if I'm reading the problem correctly, use trim.

But you said earlier... anywhoo....yes, the problem is that regex does not handle nested tagging very well. More accurately, it handles it very poorly. The core of DOM is in fact regex, but the broader scope of DOM is that it goes through and creates a well, model (hence the name) of the page, as a whole. So it properly matches opening/closing tags up by looking at the document as a whole. So you can use regex, but in order to make it any kind of accurate, you're going to have to look at the content as a whole and walk through everything matching them up...which is reinventing the wheel. There is already another active thread about DOM on this very page that looks suspiciously familiar to this thread (trying to get contents of a div...asking for a regex solution, being told about DOM...hmm...not insinuating anything..just..awfully coincidental...). Anyways..it's on the front page of the forum, so look into how to do the whole DOM thing there. edit: in fact, I'll even give you a link to it, save yourself the trouble of trying to find it. http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,256532.0.html

It's a matter of perspective. Balancing form and function is not easy. There are plenty of sites out there on both sides of the spectrum. Many go too far with form, at the expense of function, but many also go too far with function, at the expense of form. Coders tend to lean towards function. They are predisposed to have bias against form. At best, they will look at it as how it measures up to function, instead of how it stands on its own. Or in other words, they tend to think that there is no value to form if there is no function. Non-coders on the other hand, tend to lean more towards form. They want the pretty girlfriend, even if she's useless and spends all their money. They want the $100k uber-car, even though it's a gas guzzler and that $5k car is more dependable. They want the 3 story, 20 room mansion, even though they are a bachelor and are rarely even home to begin with. One can argue that it doesn't matter how shiny a site is, if it doesn't work, people won't use it. But you can equally argue that no matter how efficient and secure something is, handles every circumstance that may come up, etc.. if it's not shiny, people simply won't be interested enough to give it a try.

Now that I will agree with.

Think of it as addition for strings. 8 + 8 = 16 '8' . '8' = 88

Again, I'd like to see where you're getting your numbers. javascript is native, built-in to browsers. Flash is a plugin. Without even looking at the numbers it would be logical to put your chips on javascript being more widely enabled.

estimated 90% of users have js disabled eh? I'd like to see where you got that number...we use tracking systems like google analytics, yahoo analytics, and omniture's site catalyst with our clients at my job; lots of big name companies that get upwards of a million hits a day. Numbers show us an estimated 2% of users do not have javascript enabled. That metric calculated by number of noscript image requests generated vs. total hits.

regex is not really good for that sort of thing. It does not handle nested tags very well. Stick with DOM.

I thought that wasn't possible with php? Like, I know you can do forking..sort of..but that's not really the same thing..

well something has to execute the script. If it's done through a request, the user will have to wait around until it's done, as it would make the request and wait for a response. Only other way is to get the server to do it independently of the user, which would be by setting up a cronjob.

You mostly understood right. okay to be clear: "2009-06-14 17:50" is not a timestamp. It is a string that represents the date, that is readable by humans. As far as php (or computers in general) is concerned, it's just some arbitrary string. Computers keep track of time via timestamps. And a timestamp is that long number, which is the number of seconds since the unix epoch. So if you want to find out the number of minutes between two strings that you interpret as a date/time, you would first convert them into their timestamp equivalent so php can understand it. Then subtract the two. The result would be the difference in seconds. Since you want it to be in minutes, you would then divide by 60, since there are 60 seconds in a minute. So for your example times, you would do this: edit: woops, accidentally hit post instead of preview... example: $dateA = strtotime('2009-06-14 17:00'); $dateB = strtotime('2009-06-14 17:50'); $diff = ($dateB - $dateA) / 60; echo $diff . " minutes difference"; I'd also like to just throw out there that if both of these date/times are in sql, you can have sql perform these operations and just return you the difference. Not really sure about your setup though, so that may not be applicable.

okay well hold up, as far as suggesting the next best answer, something like levenshtein() should do the trick for you. For some reason in my last post I was still thinking about your OP. similar_text() and levenshtein() are indeed useful for figuring out a "next best answer" sort of thing. Why? Because they return how many "steps" it takes to get from one string to another, so you can loop through each wrong answer, comparing them to the right answer, and the smaller the number returned, the "closer" that string is to the answer.

which (sub)array/element of $arr your stuff will be in depends on the regex. $arr[0] always contains the full regex match. $arr[1] contains the first full captured match (the regex within parenthesis). $arr[2] would have the matches from the 2nd capture, etc.. Consider the following string: $string = "<a href='blah'>something</a>"; //This will only return $arr[0] and that will contain the whole string. preg_match_all("~<a[^>]*>.*?</a>~",$string,$arr); // $arr[0] : <a href='blah'>something</a> // This will return $arr[0] and $arr[1] preg_match_all("~<a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>~",$string,$arr); // $arr[0] : <a href='blah'>something</a> // $arr[1] : something // This will return $arr[0] and $arr[1] and $arr[2] preg_match_all("~<a href='([^']*)'[^>]*>(.*?)</a>~",$string,$arr); // $arr[0] : <a href='blah'>something</a> // $arr[1] : blah // $arr[2] : something

if by now() you mean time(), that's called a unix timestamp. It's a numeric representation of time, in seconds, since the unix epoch. You would convert your time strings into their timestamps and subtract. The result would be in seconds, so you would want to divide by 60 to get minutes.

No. And neither does levenshtein. What those 2 functions do (in their own ways) is calculate the shortest amount of "moves" or "changes" it takes to get from one string to another. So for instance, if I compared "something" vs. "somethings" : it would take one "move" to make them equal: remove the "s" "something" vs. "osmething" : would return 2 etc.. which mostly seems like the opposite of what he wants, but it is not always the opposite, so you can't even exploit the oppositeness. Not really going to get into the why's of that, as frankly, I do not fully understand the those algorithms, just that in short, as mentioned, they try to calculate the shortest amount of changes it would take to make string1 into string2. Now, if the OP would like to take a different approach to his game or whatever, those 2 functions might indeed be something of interest to him, but again, they can't really be used for what he's asking.

Uh oh. Sounds like someone didn't get enough of a beating the first time around, and is looking for seconds

you can only use server-side scripting (or even client-side scripting, like js) to grab cookies off the same domain, and even then, you can only operate within the scope of the directory for which it is set. For instance, if you set a cookie with a scope of www.site1.com/folder1/ script running from site2 cannot access it, but even www.site1.com/folder1/folder2/script.php cannot access it. which is how it should be. I do not want random sites being able to grab cookies off other sites. Huge security breech.

Just for that, I'm going to mention how you're not privy to our epic limerick thread.