Google recently released a new REST API which will replace their old SOAP API (which they haven’t given out keys for since 2006)

This is very good news for those who want to do searchqueries “server-side”.

Documentation: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/doc…entation/#fonje
Video: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/20…om-outside.html

Here’s some PHPcode of how to use this API:

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<?php
$url = “http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Hello%20World”
 
// sendRequest
// note how referer is set manually
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, “http://www.knark.com”);
$body = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
 
// now, process the JSON string
$json = json_decode($body);
// now have some fun with the results…
?>

Since PHP 5.1.2 the hash function is enabled by default. To create a sha256 hash you simply write:

hash("sha256", $data, false);

There you have your sha256 hash!

SQL injections are common nowadays and plenty of sites get hacked because of insecure database calls.

Making it bulletproof against injections is hard and will take time, but making safer calls are essential and doesn’t take that long to make.

So, what is a SQL injection?

To clearify it I will give a very easy example:

A database may look something like this:
ID | USERNAME | PASSWORD

When you make a call to that database your query can look something like this:

SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '2'

So far no problems.. But when you code it, it will be something like this (the insecure way):

$sql = "SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '".$_POST['id']."'";

If you make that query and has a id that is “2″, there will be no problem, but if you change it to something else, you will get some problems.

What if $_POST[’id’] would contain something like: ‘ or 1=1– ?

The query would now be:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '' or 1=1--";

That would automaticly select the whole database since that “or 1=1″ definetly is true.

That was a very short description of what a SQL injection is so how can we now prevent without using any PDO? Using PDO may be the most secure way but requires more knowledge too.

Three lines of code will secure your code against the most known injections and will make it a lot harder to inject your site and hack it. One of this lines will take care of XSS hacking methods too:

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$_POST = array_map("htmlspecialchars", $_POST);	# Will secure from XSS
$_POST = array_map("trim", $_POST); # Remove spaces before and after posts
$_POST = array_map("mysql_real_escape_string", $_POST); # Protects from most known SQL injections

Just add these lines in the top include file and you will always have your $_POST protected from the most known SQL injections. One easy way of securing your web applications a little further.

There are some major differences between PHP and C++. PHP is significantly less strict than C++ and it supports dynamic typich which allows you to assign values of different types to the same variable. There are also no pointers in PHP, instead you use a mechanism of references.

When you take a look on the object-oriented fact, PHP is kind of inferior to C++, but in the newer editions, PHP 5.X, PHP has started to think of it more and more.

If you compare the operators, there is a small difference there as well. In PHP you a string might return NULL if a substring is not found or 0 if the string starts with the substring. In C++ it’s not possible to distinguish 0 and Null.

One other difference is that PHP is far inferior to C++ in the aspect of performance. You shouldn’t make any complicated and sophisticated softwares with PHP since C++ is superior in the performance part. On the other hand, PHP is the standard in dynamic web page processing, which leads PHP to be almost more used then C++, therefore there are more resources available for PHP.

Ruby is a programming language that has been placed in the shade of languages like php and java.

So why are people afraid of ruby?
Obviously there is no answer to that question, but one could be the “strange” syntax. Or in fact, it has a nonstrange syntax and all other programming languages has a strange syntax.

The coolest part abour ruby that it is 100% object oriented (OO). Check these differences between a php source and a ruby source. Both lines of code will output the same line but in lowcase intead.

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"THIS IS A NORMAL STRING IN UPPER LETTERS".lowcase

That’s because all string, integers and bools are objects.

Then, if you’re using PHP, you would have to place the string into a function like this:

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strtolower("YOU SHOULDN'T ALWAYS USE CAPITALS");

In fact you save some time using ruby in this case..

There are cool things about Ruby but since the syntax is so easily human-read, I believe programmers have difficulties of writing it. They want the strange syntax that no one will understand.

Ever thought of having external content in a DIV without using iframes?

Iframes are ugly and will not validate properly in strict XHTML so therefore a solution for this is needed.
The solution we will use is a very simple PHP function that will grab the content from the page and then display it properly.

So how do we replace that iframe with something else? How can we create an iframe without an iframe?

This solution is widely used as proxy-scripts around the web and it is by far the most simple.

If you’re only aiming to replace an iframe you can do it easily with the file_get_content PHP function.

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<?php
function displaycontent($url)
{
$content = file_get_content($url);
echo $content;
}
?>

And if you are aiming for a simple proxy-script, you can just add a str_replace command and replace all hrefs with some additional characters:

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function displaycontentproxy($url)
{
$content = file_get_content($url);
$content = str_replace('href="', 'href='proxy.php?url=', $content);
}

A very simple solution to the iframe problem. Solved?

Before you comment, this is a quite lame script, however, it is quite useful as both information and other matters as well. Most people hate spamming but even though you hate it, the source code can be used as something else.

This script will spam a target site with some non existing traffic. You won’t be able to fool web analytics with this script since they will see that you’re from a single IP so there’s no reason to try.

The full source can be viewed at the bottom of this post so you don’t have to copy and extract every piece because of the comments.

Well, let’s get to the point:
In the beginning of the script, we activate error_reporting so we will get some errors written if something goes wrong:

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<?php
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);

After that piece, the configuration follows. Referer, spam-location and the number of hits will be written here:

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$referer = "http://thereferersite.com"; // Where the traffic should be sent from
$spamsite = "http://www.thespamsite.com"; // The spam site location
$times = 1; // Number of times you want to traffic spam a site

To continue this, we get the header part. Here we will have the User-agent, which referer we have and which site we have targeted:

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$header = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $spamurl\r\n"; // Start of the header
$header .= "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6\r\n"; // Which useragent. XP, English, Firefox 2.0
$header .= "Referer: $referer\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n"; // Which referer to use and close the connection

When connecting with a socket you need to know which port you should pass through. PHP has a function to do this, called getservbyname. This will most likely use port 80. A full list of which service for which port is found here. We also convert the spam location site to an IP address.

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$port = getservbyname('www', 'tcp'); // Get the port to use when connecting to the www using tcp.
$ip = gethostbyname($spamsite); //Gives you the IP instead of DNS

So now we have finally got to the action part. We start with a for-loop that makes this sequence the number of times we wrote in the configuration part. After that, we create a socket with AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM and SOL_TCP.
AF_INET shows that we are using a IPv4 Internet based protocol.
SOCK_STREAM gives us a reliable, sequenced full-duplex stream which the TCP protocol are based on.
SOL_TCP basically means that we use the TCP protocol.

Then we initiates a connection using socket_connect with our socket we created and the ip address of the target site along with their www port, usually port 80.

A couple of error reports later we find the code “socket_write(..” which is a function that writes the socket with the header we have written before and the length of the buffer. This is followed up by socket_close() which just closes the connection, and then by the randomization part that just makes the script sleep for some milliseconds.

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for ($i = 1; $i <= $times; $i++) { 
  echo "Number: $i\n";
  // Create the socket!
  $socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP);
 
  if ($socket < 0)
    echo "socket_create() failed:\n".socket_strerror($socket)."\n"; // If something fails, what?
  // Connect to site using the socket you created
  $result = socket_connect($socket, $ip, $port);
 
  if ($result < 0)
    echo "socket_connect() failed ($result):\n".socket_strerror($result)."\n";	// If something fails, what?
 
  socket_write($socket, $header, strlen($header));
 
  socket_close($socket); // Closes the socket
 
  $sleep = rand (10, 70); // For randomization
  echo "Sleeping: $sleep\n\n";
  sleep ($sleep);
}
?>

It wasn’t harder then this!
Now you can use this code to create some more funny scripts that are not lame by default (spamming is).

Remember to turn on the sockets extension in your php.ini file if you didn’t have that before. Uncomment the extension=php_sockets.dll line.

The whole source-code is here:

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<?php
 
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL); // Give you all PHP errors reported
 
//
////Some of the configurations
//
$referer = "http://thereferersite.com"; // Where the traffic should be sent from
$spamsite = "http://www.thespamsite.com"; // The spam site location
$times = 1; // Number of times you want to traffic spam a site
 
//
//// Now we'll write the header that should be sent
//
$header = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $siteurl\r\n"; // Start of the header
$header .= "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6\r\n"; // Which useragent. XP, English, Firefox 2.0
$header .= "Referer: $referer\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n"; // Which referer to use and close the connection
 
//
//// A couple of more facts before the action statrs
//
 
$port = getservbyname('www', 'tcp'); // Get the port to use when connecting to the www using tcp.
$ip = gethostbyname($spamsite); //Gives you the IP instead of DNS
 
//
////Let's spam the site with the $times number of times!
//
 
for ($i = 0; $i < $times; $i++) { 
  echo "Number: $i\n";
  // Create the socket!
  $socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP);// AF_INET means IPv4 Internet based protocols.
  										     // SOCK_STREAM = sequenced, reliable, full-duplex stream. The TCP protocol is based on this.
										     // SOL_TCP means that TCP will be used.
  if ($socket < 0)
    echo "socket_create() failed:\n".socket_strerror($socket)."\n"; // If something fails, what?
  // Connect to site using the socket you created
  $result = socket_connect($socket, $ip, $port);
 
  if ($result < 0)
    echo "socket_connect() failed ($result):\n".socket_strerror($result)."\n";	// If something fails, what?
 
  socket_write($socket, $header, strlen($header)); // Writes the socket, using the header we wrote earlier and the length of the buffer
  socket_close($socket); // Closes the socket
 
  $sleep = rand (10, 70); // For randomization
  echo "Sleeping: $sleep\n\n";
  sleep ($sleep);
}
?>

There are plenty of people out there searching for a script to get the alexa ranking for a site. Last time I looked I didn’t even find a free function to get the data, just some expensive solutions.

So anyway, here’s a PHP coded function we have made that collects the alexa-data with the SimpleXML function. It’s very easily coded so everyone should understand what it does. However, since it uses the SimpleXML function, it can only be used if you run PHP5. That’s a requirement.

Please give us some credit if you use the function. A comment or anything will work!

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<?php
 
function getalexa($url){
// cdsrc.com
$request_url = "http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=".$url;
$xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url) or die("feed not loading");
return $xml->SD->POPULARITY['TEXT'];
}
 
?>

And here’s a little description of how to use it:

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<?php
echo getalexa("http://cdsrc.com");
// This would print the alexaranking of cdsrc.com
?>

Simple huh?

SimpleXML intro:
PHP4 had one pretty big drawback when you had to use external libraries to parse XML files. PHP5 had a number of XML libraries that solve this problem and one of the easiest is SimpleXML.

To test and use the function, a XML document is needed.
In this post we will use our own sitemap, located here: http://cdsrc.com/sitemap.xml.

As we write this (the document will change in future since it’s a sitemap), the document looks like this:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://cdsrc.com/wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.xsl"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/09/sitemap.xsd"	xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>http://cdsrc.com/</loc>
		<lastmod>2007-09-10T11:31:33+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
 
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
 
	<url>
		<loc>http://cdsrc.com/programming/php-random-password-generator-function.html</loc>
		<lastmod>2007-09-10T11:31:33+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
 
		<priority>0.3</priority>
	</url>
 
	<url>
		<loc>http://cdsrc.com/programming/php-and-database-space-saving-tips.html</loc>
		<lastmod>2007-09-09T13:06:17+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
 
		<priority>0.2</priority>
	</url>
 
	<url>
		<loc>http://cdsrc.com/linux/linuxbiggerthanwindows.html</loc>
		<lastmod>2007-09-09T12:45:00+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
 
		<priority>0.3</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

The documents structure is pretty easy to understand. All URL’s has a , , and . All this variables can now easily be accessed by the simple SimpleXML function.

There are a couple of methods you can use to load the XML file, one of them are to use file_get_contents() and another one, which we will use, will be shown here:

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<?php
$url_location = 'http://cdsrc.com/sitemap.xml';
$sitemap = new SimpleXMLElement($url_location,null,true);
foreach($sitemap as $url) 
{
	echo "Url: {$url->loc}<br />Lastmod: {$url->lastmod}<br />Changefreq: {$url->changefreq}</br>Priority: {$url->priority}<br /><br />";
}
?>

There are no necessary comments to this as the code is pretty simple to understand. You access the “subfields” using $url->”subfield” and the counter goes through all the posts in the whole sitemap.

If we now would execute that script, we will get this output:

Url: http://cdsrc.com/
Lastmod: 2007-09-10T11:31:33+00:00
Changefreq: daily
Priority: 1.0
 
Url: http://cdsrc.com/programming/php-random-password-generator-function.html
Lastmod: 2007-09-10T11:31:33+00:00
Changefreq: monthly
Priority: 0.3
 
Url: http://cdsrc.com/programming/php-and-database-space-saving-tips.html
Lastmod: 2007-09-09T13:06:17+00:00
Changefreq: monthly
Priority: 0.2
 
Url: http://cdsrc.com/linux/linuxbiggerthanwindows.html
Lastmod: 2007-09-09T12:45:00+00:00
Changefreq: monthly
Priority: 0.3

Thats a very great and easy way of using the “new” SimpleXML PHP 5.0 function!

Here’s a random password and string generator function for PHP.
It is totally free of use.

randpass(); Will give you a 8 characters long randomized string with numbers and letters.
The function also takes these arguments:
$numchars <-- The length in characters for the returned string.
$digits <------ Should the generated password contain figures? 1/0
$letters <----- Should it contain letters? 1/0
$sensitive <--- Both upper and lower letters? 1/0

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function randpass($numchars=8,$digits=1,$letters=1,$sensitive=0)
{
	$dig = "12345678901234567890";
	$abc = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
	if($letters == 1)
	{
	    $str .= $abc;
	}
	if($sensitive == 1)
	{
	    $str .= strtoupper($abc);
	}
	if($digits == 1)
	{
		$str .= $dig;
	}
	for($i=0; $i < $numchars; $i++)
	{
		$randomized .= $str{rand() % strlen($str)};
	}
 
return $randomized;
}

To give an example of the code:

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echo "Generated password: \n";
echo randpass(12,1,1,1);

The code above will result in:

Generated password:
4C8cly61h907