I know this is possibly an obscure use for php, but I'm working on an idea to navigate the human genome in a rather interesting way.
The problem is I need to know if I can write a php script to parse the freely available data, and if so how would I start? Are there any php scripts to do this in existence?
I'd suggest creating a database design (MySQL) that has the subset of data you want to explore in the PHP application.
Then find a way to upload the data into that data schema. For the uploading part you could use a more poweful language than PHP of your choice, it could be C#, F#, Haskell, or whatever.
This seperation will help simplify things more than doing it all in PHP.
You'll have to write a parser for that, but that should be fairly simple:
http://jc.unternet.net/genome/2bitformat.html
And an example in Perl: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=672251
Related
I did some search about localization files, see that we can use .po file or gettext but, is there any tutorial or sample of a unique solution that will work both in javascript and in php.
I want to only maintain one localization file per language that will work with both JS and PHP languages.
Would appreciates if someone can point me to some links or samples...
I found that it is typically a sign of a questionable design when translatable text is coded inside JS functions. JS is meant to implement logic, not content. The content should be provided by PHP (typically by using a templating engine) and should be used by JS. That way you only need a localization solution for PHP.
If (exceptions always occur) you really need to translate a phrase inside a JS routine you use an ajax call to fetch the translation. This also simplifies the access to the dictionary holding the translation tokens since it is again done by PHP. The dictionary can be kept in a single place.
Yep, there is. I've successfully used gettext.js a while ago, which is operating on .json or .po files. This way, you only have to maintain one translation source. The webpage I've used this for is located here so you can check out how I've did it. Good luck!
First, try to avoid gettext if you can. It's popular and stable, but it puts some burden on the translations maintenance: you will need to change the source strings, and when this happens, gettext needs to update all the message keys, and this may mess up the existing translations. An approach with constant message keys is much easier to maintain in the long run - you will need to remember to delete the keys you don't use any more, but it's a very small burden.
You can use the same translations storage format for PHP and JavaScript. If you use a key-based approach, as I suggest, it will probably be some JSON-based format. JSON is easily accessible in both PHP and JavaScript.
There are several ready-made JavaScript libraries for JSON-based internationalization. I happen to be a developer of one such library: https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n . It should be reasonably easy to adapt it to PHP.
I have a web app built on top of codeigniter. It's primarily in English but now I want to add support for other languages as well.
I'm familiar with Codeigniter's language library:
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/language.html
Which seems like a pretty good solution, however I have one problem. For each language, you must create a separate file of $lang[KEY] = VALUE statements. This means that if I want to have my Spanish speaking friend help me translate my application, they have to have the other file open next to the one they're working on. It can be pretty easy to lose track of your position.
I would like to translate this using a spreadsheet (csv) approach, picture something like this:
What are some ways I might go about accomplishing this? I've considered creating a 'master' spreadsheet for the application, and then writing a command-line php program to parse the csv file and create the appropriate language files which I would insert into my application. Is there a better way?
Did you take a look at this? http://codeigniter.com/wiki/LangBuilder
I just inherited a website written in PHP to internationalize it... The problem is the code is not consistent. It has some functions that have strings inside echo and another pieces and in another functions the php is closed and html is presented the right way.
I was looking for a tool that could easy my job as much as possible. Retrieving as much strings as it could and defining (through defines) in another file.
I though about creating a script with regex functions to achieve this but if there was anything out there... I looked but couldn't find. Maybe I'm using wrong terms as I'm not English native.
Does anyone know a good way to do this?
If you are open to using gettext for I18N, then you can use xgettext: http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/gettext/xgettext-Invocation.html
Here is a tutorial detailing how you can use it in PHP: http://www.phpdig.net/ref/rn26.html
See How to escape quote PHP strings generated by Delphi?
I am just interested to hear if anyone has used Delphi (or possibly BCB) as a code generator for PHP ...
(or thoughts about code generation from one language to another in general)
Hmm, any good books about code generation ?
I've generated javascript, SQL and Delphi many times. But mostly is basic substitution, (and the example in the post you mention looks the same), not really codegeneration in the "compiler" sense of the word.
But there are also many real compilers in Pascals and Delphi like dialects. The biggest one I think is Free Pascal (http://www.freepascal.org), which is a compiler for Object Pascal (aka delphi)
(added later:)
Besides variable substitution, basic templating engines also fall in this category. Templates are sometimes easier maintainable than the same fragement code. Specially in html/cgi land this is used a lot.
You can generate anything from a tool which can export text files no?
You can write all by the hand, or in a "delphi style" by using Delphi for PHP http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi-for-php
best regards,
anyone has used Delphi (or possibly BCB) as a code generator for PHP
PHP - no, but I'm generating a lot of Delphi/Pascal code from Delphi. I've also generated all other things used for a web application: HTML, JavaScript, CSS - but never PHP because I didn't need that. So it's possible, but simply knowing it's possible is not going to help you much.
thoughts about code generation from one language to another in general
You need to look into "text template engines" for Delphi. I can't suggest any because I wrote my own (and I'm not planing on releasing my own under any license).
I have normally hand written xml like this:
<tag><?= $value ?></tag>
Having found tools such as simpleXML, should I be using those instead? What's the advantage of doing it using a tool like that?
Good XML tools will ensure that the resulting XML file properly validates against the DTD you are using.
Good XML tools also save a bunch of repetitive typing of tags.
If you're dealing with a small bit of XML, there's little harm in doing it by hand (as long as you can avoid typos). However, with larger documents you're frequently better off using an editor, which can validate your doc against the schema and protect against typos.
You could use the DOM extenstion which can be quite cumbersome to code against. My personal opinion is that the most effective way to write XML documents from ground up is the XMLWriter extension that comes with PHP and is enabled by default in recent versions.
$w=new XMLWriter();
$w->openMemory();
$w->startDocument('1.0','UTF-8');
$w->startElement("root");
$w->writeAttribute("ah", "OK");
$w->text('Wow, it works!');
$w->endElement();
echo htmlentities($w->outputMemory(true));
using a good XML generator will greatly reduce potential errors due to fat-fingering, lapse of attention, or whatever other human frailty. there are several different levels of machine assistance to choose from, however:
at the very least, use a programmer's text editor that does syntax highlighting and auto-indentation. just noticing that your text is a different color than you expect, or not lining up the way you expect, can tip you off to a typo you might otherwise have missed.
better yet, take a step back and write the XML as a data structure of whatever language you prefer, than convert that data structure to XML. Perl gives you modules such as the lightweight XML::Simple for small jobs or the heftier XML::Generator; using XML::Simple is just a matter of arranging your content into a standard Perl hash of hashes and running it through the appropriate method.
-steve
Producing XML via any sort of string manipulation opens the door for bugs to get into your code. The extremely simple example you posted, for instance, won't produce well-formed XML if $value contains an ampersand.
There aren't a lot of edge cases in XML, but there are enough that it's a waste of time to write your own code to handle them. (And if you don't handle them, your code will unexpectedly fail someday. Nobody wants that.) Any good XML tool will automatically handle those cases.
Use the generator.
The advantage of using a generator is you have consistent markup and don't run the risk of fat-fingering a bracket or quote, or forgetting to encode something. This is crucial because these mistakes will not be found until runtime, unless you have significant tests to ensure otherwise.
hand writing isn't always the best practice, because in large XML ou can write wrong tags and can be difficult to find the reason of an error. So I suggest to use XMl parsers to create XML files.
Speed may be an issue... handwritten can be a lot faster.
The XML tools in eclipse are really useful too. Just create a new xml schema and document, and you can easily use most of the graphical tools. I do like to point out that a prior understanding of how schemas work will be of use.
Always use a tool of some kind. XML can be very complex, I know that the PHP guys are used to working with hackey little stuff, but its a huge code smell in the .NET world if someone doesn't use System.XML for creating XML.