dalecosp Today I learned logging frameworks really shouldn't be given the power to download and run code from off the Internet.

    a month later

    TIL about the PostgreSQL replace() function. (Nothing earth-shaking, just never ran into a situation before that had me searching for how to do what it does -- always did text replacing within the PHP code, I guess.)

      5 days later

      TIL PostgreSQL exposes the physical position of a row in a table by giving each table a hidden ctid column. No, you can't use this as a substitute for a primary key; anything that causes rows to be rearranged will cause their ctids to change.

      Despite this, they remain stable for long enough if you have one of those tables that don't have a proper primary key and end up with duplicate rows where you want to get rid of the duplicates.

      DELETE FROM tablename
WHERE ctid NOT IN (
    SELECT MIN(ctid)
    FROM tablename
    GROUP BY tablename.*
)

      So, grouping all identical rows together, and selecting the minimum ctid from reach group. Those are the rows in the table that get kept (one for each group of duplicate rows). Delete all the other rows.

      If you have a primary key in your table (as you generally should) then you don't need this; group by the columns other than the primary key, and use max or min or something to pick a representative primary key value. That's assuming you don't mind any dependent rows in other tables being deleted as well. It's more likely you'd want them to repoint to the definitive copy of the row you're keeping.

        13 days later

        PHP 8 removed the each() function. (I'm in the process of updating a PHP5 app to 8. Got the API test suite to pass, but now I have to look at the things not covered by that test. 🙂 )

        3 months later

        TIL: var_export() returns null for a PHP resource (which led me down a false debug path until I realized this).

        php > $context = stream_context_create($test);
php > print_r($context);
Resource id #1
php > var_dump($context);
resource(1) of type (stream-context)
php > var_export($context);
NULL
          2 months later
          6 days later

          TIL: the strftime() function is deprecated in PHP 8.1. In order to avoid deprecation warnings in a legacy application that we recently upgraded to 8.1, I opted to use https://gist.github.com/bohwaz/42fc223031e2b2dd2585aab159a20f30 and then included it into the only class that needs it with:

          <?php

namespace Foo\Bar;

use Foo\this;
use Foo\That;

// Avoid strftime() deprection warnings
// This approach avoids having to change anything else in this class
require_once __DIR__ . '/strftime.php';
use function \PHP81_BC\strftime;

class TheProblemClass {
  // lots of stuff, including one method that does a whole bunch
  // of things with date/time format strings like you use in strftime()
  // but only ever calls strftime() on one line
}

          This seemed better -- at least regarding time/effort on my part -- than trying to figure out what I would need to change in the several places it used the date/time format string. 🙂

            2 months later

            Today I learned Queen Elizabeth II died

            Rest in peace

              3 months later

              sneakyimp

              I fairly recently got the main product I work on updated to 8.1.x (from 5.something!!!). Hopefully I don't have to worry about major updates for a while? 🙂

                My principal recommendation is to go through the relevant Upgrading pages of the manual; all the ones between the "from" version and the "to" version. Skim-read first, then pay a bit more attention to incompatibilities and see if anything there rings a bell.

                sneakyimp Do you have any tips for folks upgrading from 7.4 to 8?

                Hmm...not really, other than it probably would have been easier for me if the old PHP app I was working on was more modular and leveraged compose and such for external modules. The one good thing was that we had a fairly extensive test suite for the main part of the app (it's API endpoints), so a lot of it was run the tests, research the resulting errors, fix them, search for other places in the code we used the offending function, syntax, whatever, then rinse and repeat. 🙂

                The good news is that as part of it, I simplified how the Docker images were built by using an official PHP/Apache image, so at least for the near term I should be able to update the PHP version by modifying the first line of /Dockerfile and then running the tests and seeing what happens.

                FROM php:8.1.9-apache

                🙂

                  PS: Looks like php:8.1.13-apache is out there now, so maybe it's time to try that before there are too many changes. 😉

                    Weedpacket My principal recommendation is to go through the relevant Upgrading pages of the manual; all the ones between the "from" version and the "to" version. Skim-read first, then pay a bit more attention to incompatibilities and see if anything there rings a bell.

                    I have certainly been reading those, in particular these backward-incompatible changes. The 0 == "" seems like it might be a problem. It's always helpful to hear from folks who have practical experience.

                    NogDog Hmm...not really, other than it probably would have been easier for me if the old PHP app I was working on was more modular and leveraged compose and such for external modules. The one good thing was that we had a fairly extensive test suite for the main part of the app (it's API endpoints), so a lot of it was run the tests, research the resulting errors, fix them, search for other places in the code we used the offending function, syntax, whatever, then rinse and repeat. 🙂

                    Assuming that the composer packages you use would be updated by their maintainers. 🤷 I see the wisdom of the test suite. Did any 7/8 problems seem to be especially common? I'm imagining I'll be examining a lot of equality comparisons in if and switch statements.

                    NogDog The good news is that as part of it, I simplified how the Docker images were built...

                    Interesting to know you are using Docker. I was using virtualbox for virtual machines some time back and it seemed so cumbersome. I need to hone my virtual machine chops.

                          sneakyimp it seemed so cumbersome

                          I won't claim to be a Docker expert, but my boss is. We actually deploy the Docker containers in production, so in theory our development environment is identical to the deployment environment (minus maybe some hardware differences in RAM and such?). We work on MacOS for development, and I think it used to be a PITA to get Docker working on Windows, but supposedly is much better now in the last year or 2?

                            sneakyimp Did any 7/8 problems seem to be especially common

                            The couple of things that come to mind were a number of functions that either fail or warn if you pass null to an argument, and some places where we extended a built-in class and had to add the return type specifier on overridden functions that have such specifiers now.

                              a month later
                              10 days later

                              TIL that PHP 8.2 has deprecated the dynamic creation of object variables. E.g., this will throw a warning:

                              class Foo {
    public $foo;
    public function __construct() {
        $this->foo = 'Foo';
        $this->bar = 'Bar'; // $bar was not declared
    }
}

$test = new Foo();

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property Foo::$bar is deprecated in...

                              (I was looking into upgrading an old app from 8.1 to 8.2, and ran into this in a bunch of places.)