Best practice for parsing HTML in PHP? Use DOM
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/how-do-you-parse-and-process-html-xml-in-php
[code]
function cfriend_get_href_links($html) {
// Create a new DOM Document to hold our webpage structure
$xml = new DOMDocument();
// Load the url’s contents into the DOM
$xml->loadHTML($html);
// Empty array to hold all links to return
$links = array();
//Loop through each <a> tag in the dom and add it to the link array
foreach($xml->getElementsByTagName(‘a’) as $link) {
$links[] = array(‘url’ => $link->getAttribute(‘href’), ‘text’ => $link->nodeValue);
}
//Return the links
return $links;
}
Best practice mysql NULL or not ?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1267999/mysql-better-to-insert-null-or-empty-string
I Personally use NULL for more powerful results..
By using NULL you can distinguish between “put no data” and “put empty data”.
Some more differences:
A LENGTH of NULL is NULL, a LENGTH of an empty string is 0.
NULLs are sorted before the empty strings.
COUNT(message) will count empty strings but not NULLs
You can search for an empty string using a bound variable but not for a NULL. This query:
SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE mytext = ?
will never match a NULL in mytext, whatever value you pass from the client. To match NULLs, you’ll have to use other query:
SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE mytext IS NULL
How to store and deal with Mysql currency money value data?
Since money needs an exact representation don’t use data types that are only approximate like float. You can use a fixed-point numeric data type for that like
numeric(15,2)
15 is the precision (total length of value including decimal places)
2 is the number of digits after decimal point
See MySQL Numeric Types:
These types are used when it is important to preserve exact precision, for example with monetary data.
I personally use numeric(19,4) for financial records that gives you a better hand to play and adopt new requests easily.
 { // Create a new DOM Document to hold our webpage ... ){kind=link}
 15 is the precision (total ... ){kind=link}
