Tim's Bandwagon » PHP

array_mode

Tim Brayshaw — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:49:03 +0000

If you’ve ever needed to get calculate a mode value in php, you’ll notice that there isn’t a native function to do so.

I couldn’t get the function in Pear’s Math_Statistics to work with non-numeric values, so here’s a function that does.


 
/**
 * Calculates the frequently occuring value(s) in an array.
 *
 * @param  array $data
 * @return array
 */
function array_mode($data)
{
    if(!is_array($data)) {
        throw new Exception('First argument $data must be an array.');
    }
    $frequencies = array_count_values($data);
    // Double-check that frequencies are sorted in reverse order,
    // I think array_count_values actually returns in this format
    // already, but the manual doesn't mention it.
    arsort($frequencies);
    $isFirst = true; // Yuk
    $mode = array();
    foreach ($frequencies as $thisValue=>$thisFrequency) {
        if ($isFirst == true) {
            $isFirst = false; // Wince
            $mode[] = $thisValue;
            $modeFrequency = $thisFrequency;
            continue;
        }
        if ($modeFrequency == $thisFrequency) {
            $mode[] = $thisValue;
        }
        if ($modeFrequency > $thisFrequency) {
            break;
        }
    }
    return $mode;
}
 
var_dump(array_mode(array('a', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd')));
/*
array(1) {
  [0]=>
  string(1) "a"
}
*/
 
var_dump(array_mode(array('a', 'a', 'b', 'b', 'c')));
/*
array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(1) "a"
  [1]=>
  string(1) "b"
}
*/

Preview Markdown Documents in BBEdit

Tim Brayshaw — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 18:52:41 +0000

A quickie: here’s a way of directly previewing Markdown documents in the BBEdit preview window using PHP. (Inspired by this Python method that does the same thing).

Make a template file (you’ll probably want to add some styles to this).

~/Sites/markdown-preview/template.html


        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<title>Markdown Preview</title>
</head>
<body>
##markdown##
</body>
</html>

Make the php file, and follow the instructions in the PHP comments.

~/Sites/markdown-preview/index.php


 
/*
 * Download these and put them somewhere in your php path:
 *
 *     http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
 *     http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/
 */
include_once 'markdown.php';
include_once 'smartypants.php';
 
/*
 * You'll need to change this:
 */
$markdownDocsDir = isset ($_SERVER['MARKDOWN_DOCS_DIR']) ? $_SERVER['MARKDOWN_DOCS_DIR'] : '/Users/username/Documents';
 
/*
 * You'll need to set up BBEdit to use something like this as the Preview Server URL:
 *
 *     http://localhost/markdown-preview/?file=/
 */
$file = $_GET['file'];
$text = file_get_contents ($markdownDocsDir . $file);
$formatted = SmartyPants(Markdown($text), '2');
 
/*
 * Display the formatted text via a simple template.
 */
$templateFile = './template.html';
$templateText = file_exists ($templateFile) ? file_get_contents ($templateFile) : "##markdown##";
echo (str_replace ('##markdown##', $formatted, $templateText));
 
?>

Geeky Sunday Afternoon Tinkering

Tim Brayshaw — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:40:36 +0000

Tinkering project #1 – Get the dates of posts and comments to display with an ordinal suffix for the day of the month.

I wanted to display the dates of posts and comments using numbers for the day of the month like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th. It wasn’t too tricky, but required a bit of tinkering.

Now, I’ve got a convoluted setup for this blog, but essentially it uses Movable Type for the admin and back-end, and the pages are displayed using Smarty, a PHP template engine. Smarty has a date formatting modifier that works just fine (a wrapper PHP’s strftime function), but unfortunately strftime doesn’t support ordinal suffixes, whereas PHP’s date function does.

So, I made a Smarty plugin that acts as a wrapper to the date function, you can get it here: modifier.phpdateformat.php.txt. The template syntax is {$variable|phpdateformat:'jS F'} (replace the jS F bit with any of the format characters used by PHP’s date function).

Tinkering project #2 – Put a GUI on my CD Wallet Label Generator.

I’ve recently been using CDFinder to catalog the backups and archives I’ve got on CD-ROM and DVD. I work making websites and CD-ROMs so over the years I’ve amassed quite a collection!

I’ve been giving each cataloged CD an index number (as a CDFinder comment), then filing the CD under that index number. I couldn’t find a suitable utility for printing lots of sequential index labels, so I knocked one together using PHP. (Yes, it did occur to me that I could just write them with a pen or pencil, but I wanted something neater and tidier – and more “formal”.)

Introducing Tim’s Simple CD (or DVD) Sleeve Index Generator. I use it for printing onto plain white paper CD wallets. It’s pretty much tailored for my individual needs, but it’s slightly configurable, so maybe someone else will find it useful too!

folder2dot

Tim Brayshaw — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 18:15:39 +0000

I’ve spent some of this morning packaging a PHP script I wrote a few months ago into a little Mac OS X application. It was at risk of going stale, so thought I’d let it out into the open for a bit of air. It’s called folder2dot. When you drop a folder onto it in the Finder it creates a ‘dot’ file that represents the item’s contents and sub-contents.

You can then render the ‘dot’ file with the Graphviz graph drawing tools (I recommend the Macintosh port of Graphviz) and you get a diagram of the dropped item’s contents and sub-contents. You might be able to open the ‘dot’ file using Omnigraffle (it supports a subset of the DOT language — I haven’t tried it yet!).

I found it handy to visualise the inventory of the files in a website I was redeveloping; it produces fairly plain output that is probably most useful as a starting-point.

Talking PHP

Tim Brayshaw — Fri, 04 Apr 2003 14:04:51 +0000

I just figured out how to trigger speech from PHP on MacOS X. I’m finding it handy for debugging, but it has opened up a whole new world of stupid possibilities.

if ($condition) {
    say("Hello");
}
 
function say($something)
{
    exec("osascript -e 'say "$something"'");
}

Movable Type and PHP Smarty Templates

Tim Brayshaw — Fri, 08 Nov 2002 00:21:39 +0000

Smart templating with Movable Type shows how to link MT with Smarty. (I’m running these pages through Smarty, but in a rather less elegant way than Brad outlines.)