Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

quick tip

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Let’s talk about phone numbers on mobile sites

Wes Bos shares a quick tip to make phone numbers on websites tappable.

I’m talking about when phone numbers on a website aren’t tapable. Often the HTML is so that mobile operating systems cannot select the phone number alone and you are forced to remember/recite or write down the actual number.

So, when you put a phone number on a website, don’t just use any old element, use a link with the tel protocol.

http://wesbos.com/lets-talk-about-phone-numbers-on-mobile-sites/

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Improving readability using array_filter

In this post I'd like to share a quick tip on how you can improve the readability of your code with array_filter.

Today I was working on some code that looked something like this:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        $address = [
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'location' => $this->location,
        ];

        if ($this->line2 != '') {
            $address['line2'] = $this->line2;
        }

        if ($this->busNumber != '') {
            $address['busNumber'] = $this->busNumber;
        }

        if ($this->country != '') {
            $address['country'] = $this->country;
        }


        return $address;
    }
}

Did you know that you can use array_filter to clean this up? I didn't, until today.

When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value (so null, or an empty string) Here's the refactored, equivalent code:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        return array_filter([
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'line2' => $this->line2,
            'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
            'location' => $this->location,
            'country' => $this->country,
        ]);
    }
}

That's much better!

Just be careful when using this with numeric data that you want to keep in the array. 0 is considered as a falsy value too, so it'll be removed as well.

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Processing a csv file in Laravel original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

From time to time I need to process a csv file. PHP provides a fgetcsvfunction to help with that task. Unfortunately this is a very basic function. It will not, for instance, recognize a header column as such. In this quick post I'll show how using the excellent laravel-excel package (which can…

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Using the dataset property in JavaScript

In plain old JavaScript you can get the data attributes of

[code language="html"]

lorum ipsum
```

like this

[code language="javascript"] document.getElementById('test').getAttribute('data-news-item-id');



But did you know there's a alternative way of doing this by reading an element's dataset property?

[code language="javascript"]
document.getElementById('test').dataset.newsItemId;

Notice that the values can be accessed by camelcasing the name of the data attribute. You can also write to datasets to change values of data attributes. Read the informative helpful article on MDN to know more.

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