Errata

It seems that "colspan=7" should be changed to "colspan=4", since only 4 columns are spanned by the title (see figure on pg. 13).

I'm reading the edition 11/04 of the book.
The "escape sequences" { } [ ] actually does not exist, for example

<?php echo "{}[]"; ?>

just displays (PHP 5.2):

{}[]

There is only one exception reported by the manual www.php.net:

"Again, if you try to escape any other character, the backslash will be printed too!
Before PHP 5.1.1, backslash in {$var} hasn't been printed."

Since I'm running PHP 5.2, I can't verify this sentence.

The operator ".=" is used, but it is not described until p48

The second line from the bottom has

"9 Lives." - 1 // 8 (float)

The type here is in fact an integer, as the following output shows:

Script started on Sun 09 Sep 2007 03:54:35 PM CDT
$ php --version
PHP 5.1.4 (cli) (built: Jul 14 2006 11:04:03)
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies
$ php
<?
echo gettype("9 Lives." - 1); . "
";
echo gettype("9. Lives" - 1) . "
";
?>
integer
double
$ exit

Script done on Sun 09 Sep 2007 03:56:09 PM CDT

The example presumably demonstrates the rule stated a few lines prior: "If the string contains a period (.) or upper- or lowercase e, evaluating it numberically produces a floating-point number." Taken literally, this implies that "9. Lives" - 1 should evaluate to a floating-point number, but it seems this is not the case. Perhaps the text should read "If the number at the start of the string contains a period ...", etc.

Text reads:
AS illustrated in Table 2-6, incrementing "z" or "Z" wraps it back to "a" or "Z" and....
should be:
AS illustrated in Table 2-6, incrementing "z" or "z" wraps it back to "aa" or "AA" and....

(tested in PHP5 environment)

$j was not defined in the code fragment, leading to errors when you run it.

$count was never defined in the code fragment. Correction:

function count_list(){
if(func_num_args() == 0){
return false;
}

else {
$count = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < func_num_args();$ i++){
$count += func_get_arg($i);
}
return $count;
}
}

Most of the Specifiers should be lower-case letters. Also, there is a difference between "e" and "f" as listed below.

(From PHP.net -> http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.sprintf.php)
b - the argument is treated as an integer, and presented as a binary number.
c - the argument is treated as an integer, and presented as the character with that ASCII value.
d - the argument is treated as an integer, and presented as a (signed) decimal number.
e - the argument is treated as scientific notation (e.g. 1.2e+2). The precision specifier stands for the number of digits after the decimal point since PHP 5.2.1. In earlier versions, it was taken as number of significant digits (one less).
f - the argument is treated as a float, and presented as a floating-point number (locale aware).
F - the argument is treated as a float, and presented as a floating-point number (non-locale aware). Available since PHP 4.3.10 and PHP 5.0.3.
o - the argument is treated as an integer, and presented as an octal number.
s - the argument is treated [as] and presented as a string.
u - the argument is treated as an integer, and presented as an unsigned decimal number.
x - the argument is treated as an integer and presented as a hexadecimal number (with lowercase letters).
X - the argument is treated as an integer and presented as a hexadecimal number (with uppercase letters).

The examples on page 80 all seem to work, although using unspecified variables ($day, $month, $year) is somewhat confusing.
Am also hard-pressed to find what a "double" and a "double with precision" are - are these terms explained anywere in the book?

The calls of print_r on true, false, and NULL have comments indicating that
is printed. This is not correct. No
is printed for any of the calls. So print_r(true) results in the output of a single 1, nothing more, and print_r(false) and print_r(NULL) produce no output at all.

Because there are no leading or trailing tabs in $record, the effect of calling trim with a charlist is exactly the same as calling trim without a charlist. So the example fails to illustrate the point that it is intended to show.

This example should be rewritten:

$record = " Fred\tFlintstone\t35\tWilma \n";
$record = trim($record, " \r\n\0\x0B");
// $record is "Fred\tFlintstone\t35\tWilma"

As it stands, the " \r\n\0\x0B" (charset argument) could be omitted and would give the same results. Only leading/trailing tabs are removed automatically, not inner tabs, so the charset argument is unnecessary. As a better example, some tabs should be added to the beginning or end of the $record variable. So a possible fix is to change the first line to:
$record = " \tFred\tFlintstone\t35\tWilma\t \n";

missing a closing quote:
$bits = parse_url('http://me:secret@example.com/cgi-bin/board?user=fred);

The last sentence of the paragraph states "[^]] matches any character that is not a closing bracket". This is true only if one is using Perl-compatible regular expressions. When using POSIX-style regular expressions, the first "]" in "[^]]" is treated as the closing bracket of the character class, and so "[^]]" matches any two-character sequence in which the first character is not "" and the second character is "]".

I tried the example

ereg('([0-9]+)', 'You have 42 magic beans', $captured);

The function does return true as written in the book. The problem is with the var $captured. If you perform var_dump you have the following:
array(2) { [0]=> string(2) "42" [1]=> string(2) "42" }

Shouldn't index 0 (zero) contain the whole string? "The zeroth element of the array is set to the entire string being matched against."

Since POSIX-style does use of the Unix locale system I tried it also on Windows and get the same results for $captured var.

original line:
ereg('y(.*)e$', 'Sylvie', $a); // returns true, $a is array('Sylvie', 'lvi')

should be
ereg('y(.*)e$', 'Sylvie', $a); // returns true, $a is array('ylvie', 'lvi')

On the bottom of the page (and in the header of the next page) we can see 2 patters:

1) '/([[:alpha:]]+)s+1/'
2) '/([[:alpha:]]+)s+1)/x'

I guess the problem is in the statement: "These two patterns are the same, but one is much easier to read".

They are not the same. As instructed in the book the 2nd one will strip whitespaces before matching. If so, it will not find repeated words.

Example:

$pattern1 = '/([[:alpha:]]+)s+1/';
$pattern2 = '/([[:alpha:]]+s+1)/x';

$str = 'Look for a word word again.';

if(preg_match($pattern1, $str))
echo 'true';
else
echo 'false';

You'll have different results for $pattern1 and $pattern2

In this code (p 117-118):

$to_find = '/usr/local/etc/rsync.conf';
$re = preg_quote($filename, '/');
if (preg_match("/$re", $filename)) {
// found it!
}

The $filename variable in the preg_quote function should be changed to $to_find:

$re = preg_quote($to_find, '/');

The 3 sample function calls listed at the top of the page are incorrect. When I inserted echo statements into the function, it indicated that the actual function calls were:

add_up ( , 2)
add_up (4, 3)
add_up (13, 5)
add_up (38, 7)

In fact, this is the only way the result could be correctly computed.

The example in the book would be correct if the array were (3, 5, 7) and the seeded initial value was 2, for a total of 85 (not 87 as indicated in the text).

Output from Example 5-4: there is one too many 'Exiting' output message. The last is
one 'Exiting' output message line should be removed. After 'Entering first (...)'
there should only be the exiting messages from first() and third().

3rd paragraph:
"A constructor is [..] called __construct()."

Then follows an example showing exactly this.

4th paragraph then suddenly uses the class name as a constructor:

class Person(..) {
...
function Person(..)

No single explanation that both are valid (is it?)

In all three examples of the temperature conversion code, in the 'input' statement for the 'submit' button, the button text should be declared as "value" instead of "name". If the example is entered as shown in the text, the button is displayed with "Submit Query", and the text "Convert to Celsius!" does not appear.

$movies = array (...);
shoud say
$books = array (...);

In 3rd line from end of function BookList, $x receives the result
of the function join(). The call to function join passes in an
empty string as the first parameter and an array of lines of a file
as the second parameter (the result of the call to the file() function).
However, the join reference on page 444 says that join() should expect
an array as its first parameter and string as its second. I think that
either the call to join on 275 or the reference info on 444 is reversed.

I just looked up join and implode on php.net. It says the parameters
can be in either order, so I guess this isn't really a mistake. However,
to save people the confusion, it would be great if you could make a note
of this is the join documentation on 444 and the implode documentation
on 438, or just change the example on 275 to be consistent with your
own documentation.

When I run the sample code below:

$parser = new domdocument();
$rootNode = $parser->load('books.xml');

processNodes($rootNode);

function processNodes($node) {
$children = $node->children;

foreach ($children as $child) {
if ($child->nodeType == XML_TEXT_NODE) {
echo $child->noteValue;
}
elseif ($child->nodeType == XML_ELEMENT_NODE) {
processNodes($child);
}
}
}

I get the following PHP Warning error:

Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in websiteswebappslearnPHPProgPHP2Ch11-
XMLParseXML-DOM2.php on line 10

Any suggestions?

Example 11-12:

<xsl:value-of select="teaser"/> is not necessary because the XML document (example 11-11)
does not contain any <teaser> elements.

return str_replace ('...', '...', $contents);
should be:
return str_replace ('...', '...', $text);

"Open the Control Panels folder, and double-click on the ODBC Data Sources icon."

Under Windows XP there is no ODBC Data Sources icon in the Control Panel folder.
However, there is a 'Administrative Tools' icon. If you open the 'Administrative
Tools' folder, you see the ODBC Data Sources icon.

Replace 'from "1" through' by 'from "0" through'.

In the function definition, the parameters are reversed.
Should be:
string implode(string separator, array strings)

In the function definition, the parameters are reversed.
Should be:
string join(string separator, array strings)

Is: "Executes command via the shell and returns the last line of output from the command ..."
Should be: "... returns the output from the command ..."

"the last line" describes the exec() function, not shell_exec()

The signatures use the variable 'string' but the descriptions mistakenly use 'subject' as well as 'string' to refer to 'string'.

The animal on the covers is not, in fact, a common cuckoo, as the common cuckoo is not crested. It is probably a roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus).