Thankfully since then, the PHP community has embraced the PCRE functions which are more efficient and are Perl-compatible. However the downside to PCRE (and POSIX for that matter) is that you need to know regular expressions, which for a newbie to learn can feel like walking through a minefield.

Recently though the Filter Functions have become a very popular method to validate data. This is due to their small learning curve.

How to use the Filter Functions

In this example (Using the filter_var() function) the filter function takes the data you input (For example: email@example.com) and will return either the data (if it’s valid) or false (if the data is not valid).

<?php
// Filter an Email Address
var_dump(filter_var('email@example.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)); // Returns: string(17) "email@example.com"

// This is a fake email being filtered.
var_dump(filter_var('fake_mail.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)); // Returns: bool(false)

var_dump(filter_var('ema(i)l@e\xample.com', FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL )); // Returns: string(17) "email@example.com"

// Filter a URL
var_dump(filter_var('example.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)); // Returns: bool(false)

// Filter a URL
var_dump(filter_var('http://example.com', FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)); // Returns: string(18) "http://example.com"

// Example usage
$email = 'email@example.com'; // or something submitted from a form.
if(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)){ // If this returns false
	die('The email you send is invalid.');
}
?>

A handful of the useful available filters are:

• FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING – Removes HTML tags and possibly unwanted characters.
• FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL – Removes unwanted characters from an email address.
• FILTER_SANITIZE_URL – Removes unwanted characters from a URL.
• FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT – Returns only digits,  + and -.
• FILTER_VALIDATE_INT – If data is not an integer it will return false.
• FILTER_VALIDATE_URL – If data is not a URL it will return false.
• FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL – If data is not an email it will return false.
• FILTER_VALIDATE_IP- If data is not an IP it will return false.

Crazy Right? Well it’s all down to a new V8 JavaScript rendering engine, which boasts an improvement of 35%.

That’s great! What does it mean for Web Development?

Hopefully this new engine will inspire other browser programmers how to render JavaScript faster, which in 3-6 months should mean the average user experience (the 35% of users who  upgrade their browser when updates are released) should be improved.

However, this does not mean we can use create complex JavaScript websites (Such as Facebook) render quickly, instead it means subtle usability improvements to a web page should be more effective.

Note: Is anyone interested in trying to recreate this but showing other browsers loading?

View on YouTube

This video makes use of Google Chrome’s Developer Tools which allows you to edit CSS/HTML in real-time on a web page.

Update: If you use Greasemonkey the Facebook Like Bypass script will do the above for you.

function shorten_url($url, $service=NULL){
		if($service== 'tinyurl'){return get_link('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.urlencode($url));}
		elseif($service == 'urly'){return get_link('http://ur.ly/new.txt?href='.urlencode($url));}
		elseif($service == 'isgd'){return get_link('http://is.gd/api.php?longurl='.urlencode($url));}
		elseif($service == 'klam'){return get_link('http://kl.am/api/shorten/?format=text&url='.urlencode($url));}
		elseif($service == 'unu'){return get_link('http://u.nu/unu-api-simple?url='.urlencode($url));}
		else{return get_link('http://api.tr.im/v1/trim_simple?url='.urlencode($url));}
		return $url;
	}

	function get_link($url){
		if(function_exists('curl_init')){
			$ch = curl_init();
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
			//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1);
			//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
			$result = curl_exec($ch);
			$resultArray = curl_getinfo($ch);
			if ($resultArray['http_code'] == 200){
				return $result;
			} else {
				return FALSE;
			}
			curl_close($ch);
		}elseif(ini_get('allow_url_fopen') == 1){
			return fopen($url, 'r');
		}
		return FALSE;
	}

/* Usage */
echo shorten_url('http://www.fullondesign.co.uk/');
// returns: http://tr.im/JPCz