This is the best and simplest way to work with a CSV file that has the headers on the first row in PHP.


if (($handle = fopen('csv.csv', 'r')) !== false)
{
$length = 0;
$delimiter = ',';
$enclosure = '"';
$escape = '\\';

fclose($handle);
}


My plan for 2011 is to mix in more programming related posts. I figure the best place to start is a powerful PHP function that I wrote that uses curl and has helped me many many times.

function grab($url, $postparams = '', $cookiefilepath = '', $referer = '')
{
  sleep(2);

  $postheaders = array();

  $url_parts = parse_url($url);

  $postheaders[] = 'Host: ' . $url_parts['host'];
  $postheaders[] = 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; ' .
    'rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9';
  $postheaders[] = 'Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/' .
    'html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5';
  $postheaders[] = 'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5';
  $postheaders[] = 'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7';
  $postheaders[] = 'Keep-Alive: 300';
  $postheaders[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';

  if($referer != '')
  {
    $postheaders[] = "Referer: $referer";
  }

  if($postparams != '')
  {
    $postheaders[] = 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded';
    $postheaders[] = "Content-length: " . strlen($postparams);
  }

  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, 'CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $postheaders);  // $headers

  if($postparams != '')
  {
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postparams);
  }

  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

  if ($cookiefilepath != '')
  {
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookiefilepath);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookiefilepath);
  }
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

  $got_page = curl_exec($ch);
  $headers = curl_getinfo($ch);
  $error = curl_error($ch);

  curl_close($ch);

  $retval = array('result' => $got_page, 'headers' => $headers, 'error' => $error);

  return $retval;
}

This function is great for writing crawlers as you can sent over POST variables, it can pass over and store cookies in a cookiejar and passes over a “User-Agent” header so site you’re connecting to can’t tell that you’re aren’t really a browser and a referrer so you can really mimic regular page navigation .

While at work I was looking into something that we could replace MySQL with since the two trends these days are to not do any JOINS between tables and to work with large datasets. I came across a database called MongoDB which was apparently very good at both of these things and used guides on the internet to get it going on a local Linux box.

I got to a point where it was almost working 100% but for some reason my simple test script couldn’t connect when run by Apache but could when run via command line. I would get the error:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'MongoConnectionException' with message 'Permission denied'

I scoured the internet and found only a single reference to my problem but couldn’t find a solution. After direct emails with Kristina Chodorow the primary maintainer for the MongoDB Perl and PHP drivers I found that the solution to my problem was to run the command:

$ /usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

Hopefully this helps someone else. Thanks again Kristina .