Regarding the incidence of Metasyntax in the PHP Manual...

[dalecosp]

For general dissemination throughout the PHP community...

Realiziang that some of you are technical writers, I have recently finished investigating the frequency of usage of the metasyntactic variables "foo", "bar", and "baz" in the [man]handbook[/man]. I place the results here for reference, in order that the authors amongst us might aspire to excellence in all things metasyntactic by following the fine example given to us by the lords of PHP...

As you can see, there are roughly 402 instances of "foo", 311 uses of "bar", and 25 repetitions of "baz" in the online manual, according to our sources...

[Weedpacket]

And people say I have nothing better to do?!
(The reason for the distribution can be expected: "foo" is preferred, and "bar" if "foo" has already been used, and ... oops!)
Okay, now test Zipf's Law and see what the distribution of word lengths looks like.... do variable and function names follow the law?

[Elizabeth]

And to be honest, in our book, we shied away from using those variables... they're so... yesterday.

[Merve]

I'm curious. Did you use some sort of spider script to read all the files in the manual, and use a regular expression to determine the instances of the 3 words? How many times does 'qux' appear in the manual?

[dalecosp]

Heh ... like I'd work that hard. Try "foo site:php.net" at Google, and read the header list. Totally bogus research. :o But, this is the EL...you were expecting a whitepaper, or an RFC, perhaps? 😉

Now, for accuracy, hmm... I think, in looking into this, that it'll be easier once I start using PHP 5, and str_replace returns a & to int(count) ....

% grep foo php_man.html > manfoos

Returns a file of 221 lines. I'm not currently motivated to go much farther than that ...

originally posted by Merve
How many times does qux appear in the manual?

Well, the graph predicts the answer to this one, but the proof ...

<kadmin@localhost> [/www/] [23:20]
% grep qux php_man.html
<kadmin@localhost> [/www/] [23:24] 

[Mordecai]

Originally posted by Weedpacket
And people say I have nothing better to do?!

Originally posted by Merve
Did you use some sort of spider script to read all the files in the manual, and use a regular expression to determine the instances of the 3 words? How many times does 'qux' appear in the manual?

I think I'll answer both of these with a small script:

<?php
// Get the manual into a string
$man = file_get_contents('php_manual_en.html');

// Count how many times these words are repeated
$res[] = array(substr_count($man,"foo"),'foo');
$res[] = array(substr_count($man,"bar"),'bar');
$res[] = array(substr_count($man,"baz"),'baz');
$res[] = array(substr_count($man,"qux"),'qux');
$res[] = array(substr_count($man,"cai"),'cai');

// Draw a cool lookin' 3D box
function drawbox(&$im,$x,$y,$height,$word,&$brightc,&$darkc) {
  $bright = array(
    $x,$y,
    $x,$y-$height,
    $x+20,$y-20-$height,
    $x+60,$y-20-$height,
    $x+40,$y-$height,
    $x+40,$y
  );
  $dark = array(
    $x+40,$y,
    $x+40,$y-$height,
    $x+60,$y-$height-20,
    $x+60,$y-20
  );
  imagefilledpolygon($im,$bright,6,$brightc);
  imagefilledpolygon($im,$dark,4,$darkc);
  imagestring($im,3,$x,$y,$height*2,imagecolorclosest($im,0,0,0));
  imagestring($im,3,$x,$y+10,$word,imagecolorclosest($im,0,0,0));
}

// Our canvas
$im = imagecreatetruecolor(400,300);
imagefill($im,0,0,imagecolorclosest($im,255,255,255));
imagerectangle($im,0,0,399,299,imagecolorclosest($im,0,0,0));

// Allocate some colors
$black = imagecolorclosest($im,0,0,0);
$gray = imagecolorclosest($im,128,128,128);
$red = imagecolorclosest($im,255,0,0);
$darkred = imagecolorclosest($im,128,0,0);

// Set up our grid
imagerectangle($im,45,5,394,255,$gray);
imageline($im,25,25,25,275,$black);
imageline($im,45,255,25,275,$black);
//imagefill($im,30,30,$gray);
for ($i=0;$i<5;$i++) {
  imageline($im,45,5+(50*$i),25,25+(50*$i),$black);
  imageline($im,46,5+(50*$i),393,5+(50*$i),$gray);
  imagestring($im,1,10,20+(50*$i),(6-($i+1)).'00',$black);
  imagefill($im,40,100,$gray);
}
imageline($im,25,275,374,275,$black);
imageline($im,394,255,374,275,$black);
imagefill($im,100,260,$gray);
imagerectangle($im,45,5,394,255,$black);

// Draw our 3D boxes
drawbox($im,50,275,$res[0][0]/2,$res[0][1],$red,$darkred);
drawbox($im,120,275,$res[1][0]/2,$res[1][1],$red,$darkred);
drawbox($im,190,275,$res[2][0]/2,$res[2][1],$red,$darkred);
drawbox($im,260,275,$res[3][0]/2,$res[3][1],$red,$darkred);
drawbox($im,330,275,$res[4][0]/2,$res[4][1],$red,$darkred);

// Output image
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
// Destroy
imagedestroy($im);
?>

See the lovely output it generates:

🙂

[Merve]

dammit, they hate qux! :xbones:

Oh well 🆒