Cowburn — Find me on GitHub and StackOverflow.

PHP 7 logo downloads 18 Jun 2015

A PHP 7 logo; collaboration between me and Vincent Pontier.

Becoming the editor of the PHP manual 27 May 2015

A journey begins into the land of responsibility in the story of my involvement with authoring the PHP manual, after volunteering for the editor role following Philip Olson's stepping down.

SplFileObject::fread() 06 Sep 2014

PHP 5.5.11 introduced a new method to the useful SplFileObject class, in order to make reading the whole file easier.

Flattening a multidimensional array in PHP 17 Mar 2012

The task is to "flatten" nested arrays into a single series containing all of the values.

Glob Patterns for File Matching in PHP 30 Apr 2010

Overview of the wildcard patterns that can be used with glob().

Using PHP Functions in XPath Expressions 23 Oct 2009

The DOMXPath::registerPHPFunctions() method is available as of PHP 5.3.0 and allows the use of PHP functions (and static methods) within XPath queries to complement the normal set of XPath functions.

The InfiniteIterator in PHP 25 Sep 2009

Introducing the InfiniteIterator which is part of the Standard PHP Library (SPL).

Anonymous Functions and Closures (as of PHP 5.3) 08 Jul 2009

A brief introduction to anonymous function literals and closures.

XPath for CSS classes 15 Jun 2009

How to match a specific CSS class name in an XPath query.

Parsing Dates with DateTime 14 Jun 2009

What to do when strtotime() misbehaves.

Joined the PHP Documentation Team 12 Jun 2009

Write The F***ing Manual!

Modal value(s) in PHP 01 Apr 2009

Creating a function to find the most common value(s) in an array.

Tiny Little GIFs 15 Mar 2009

Thirty-six little bytes, and nothing much to see. My attempt at creating the tiniest transparent GIF image possible.

Server download speed using PHP cURL 29 Nov 2008

Using cURL to get an idea of the download speed of your web server.

ElePHPant 29 Feb 2008

Everyone loves a furry blue elephpant.

PHP Imagecreate & Different File Types 22 Jan 2008

Using imagecreatefromstring() to create a GD image.

PHP Get File Extension 13 Jan 2008

There are numerous ways to get a file extension in PHP. Learn how to do it right, by using the pathinfo() function.

PHP Variable Names: Curly Brace Madness 12 Jan 2008

Having fun with a quirkier side of PHP syntax.

PHP5 Method Chaining 19 Sep 2007

If you return $this then you can chain method calls together.

Don't repeat yourself when using printf! 17 Sep 2007

Using numbered placeholders to reuse argument values.

T-SQL - Using a parameter in SELECT TOP clause 15 Mar 2007

Wrap the variable in parenthesis and magic...