Every so often, I get asked about whether it is really worth it to chase double quotes and constructs like print "foo $bar baz", and replace them with something like echo 'foo', $bar, 'baz', or even to remove all those big heredoc strings so convenient for large texts.

Of course, most of the time, spending hours to fine comb code in search of this will result in less of a speedup than rethinking just one SQL query, but the answer is still that, yes, in the infinitesimal scale, there is something to be gained. Even with string reformatting ? Yes, even that. But only if you are not using an optimizer.

Just don't take my word for it, Sara Golemon explained it years ago with her "How long is a piece of string" post, in 2006.

In case you somehow managed to miss today's announcement, Facebook's Hip-Hop is now available, along with a wiki to show how to build it, and an issue tracker, all on Github.

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

For a recent case, I had to define the behaviour of a system with a lot of independent conditions to check, which could trigger any number of a set of messages and actions on data, and all of this based on a plain english (i.e. non algorithmic) description of the data, which only covered the most commons scenarios for these conditions, leaving lots of undefined combinations of inputs. What's one to do in such cases ?

I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

Browsing the referers leading to my blog, I just noticed one of my recent posts about PHP-GTK2 Console encoding had been noticed by PHPDeveloper, where the reviewers apparently take time to actually read feed to which they point to, instead of merely aggregating them, which allows them to sum up content for their own readers. Now that's what one can call a press review.