This is the example code that from Learning PHP by David Sklar.
See an error? Report it here, or simply fork and send us a pull request.
If you want a copy of all of the example code snippets in this repo, lick the Download Zip button to the right to download everything.
Each subdirectory in the display-code directory corresponds to one chapter of the book. Each chapter directory has a toc.txt file that lists the files in the directory in the order they appear in the book. The first column in toc.txt lists the example number of the piece of code (if any). The second column is the filename. For example, net/toc.txt begins as follows:
1 fgc-get.php
- fgc-get.out
2 fgc-query-params.php
- fgc-query-params.out
This means that the contents of Example 11-1 are in net/fgc-get.php. The next code excerpt that appears in the book isn't PHP code, but showing the output of a program. That's in net/fgc-get.out. Then comes Example 11-2, whose contents you can find in net/fgc-query-params.php, and then what's in net/fgc-query-params.out.
The files under display-code are useful because they mirror exactly what appears in the book but they are not directly runnable for a number of reasons -- most don't include <?php PHP start tags and lots of them depend on other files that contain necessary code to be included.
The code directory provides runnable versions of each code snippet. It is organized the same way (with the same toc.txt files). The runner.php program runs one or more code examples. runner.php --help tells you how to use it:
runner.php [--chapter=CHAPTER] [--code=CODE] [--bare] [--fail-first] [--ignore-net-fail] [--cli=CLI]
Runs one or more code examples and reports on success/failure.
--chapter=CHAPTER Run code examples from chapter CHAPTER
--code=CODE Run code example CODE
--cli=CLI Use PHP binary installed at CLI
--bare Just run the code, don't report on success/failure
--fail-first Exit after first code failure
--ignore-net-fail Ignore failures that seem to be from a lack of network
PHP binary configured to run code examples:
/usr/local/bin/php
--chapter and --code and each be specified more than once.
CHAPTER and CODE are interpreted as shell globs.
CHAPTER should just be the name of a chapter file without
extension, e.g. "datetime".
CODE should be the name of a chapter code directory, then /,
then the basename of the code example, e.g. "datetime/interval"
For example, you can try runner.php --code=datetime/interval or runner.php --chapter=datetime. runner.php depends on a few things installable by Composer. Run composer install from the same directory that runner.php is in to install them. A lot of the code examples depend on other things installed by Composer as well. Run composer install from the code subdirectory to install them.
Normally, runner.php runs a code snippet and checks that it emitted the correct output (or the expected errors, if the code snippet is illustrating some error scenario). runner.php employs a number of auxiliary files to determine the expected output or errors and settings to use when running the code.
For a given code example in, say, code/some-chapter/some-code.php, the following additional files control the behavior of runner.php:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
code/some-chapter/some-code.out |
expected output from running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.err |
expected error output from running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.out.regex |
a regular expression that is expected to match the output from running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.err.regex |
a regular expression that is expected to match the error output from running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.out.strip |
remove all newlines from some-code.out before considering it as expected output |
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
code/some-chapter/some-code.prepend.php |
auto_prepend_file to use when running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.append.php |
auto_append_file to use when running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.stdin |
data to pass on standard input to the running code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.args |
commandline args (one per line) to provide to php when running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.faketime |
use libfaketime to set the time to the timespec in this file when running the code |
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
code/some-chapter/some-code.server |
start a PHP server listening on port 7000 running the code in this file before running the code |
code/some-chapter/some-code.server.ini |
key=value configuration directive settings, one per line, to use when running the server |
code/some-chapter/some-code.skip |
don't actually execute the code, just check its syntax |
*.out and *.err can also contain a few special things to make matching expected output easier. The string {{*}} in *.out or *.err matches the full path to the executing code file. The string {{d}} matches the directory of the executing code file (with a trailing /). The string {{!}} matches any path starting with /.
If you want runner.php to run a piece of code and not check the expected output/errors, provide the --bare commandline argument. That still uses the various files to set ini values, args, and so forth, but then just outputs anything the code snippet does instead of checking to see if it matches expected values.
Some the code snippets in the datetime directory use libfaketime and .faketime files to specify that the system time should be a certain value when running the code snippet. This makes for predictable output that can be checked. If you want this to work, install libfaketime. If libfaketime is not present, runner.php will just skip the snippets that require it.
Some of the code snippets in the net directory use php7.example.com as a hostname for a server to connect to. This is not a real, functioning server name. The "server" in question is another script started by runner.php because of a *.server files. To make these code snippets function properly, you need to tell your computer to map the hostname php7.example.com to your computer. One way to do this is to add a line such as the following to your /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 localhost php7.example.com