Dwoo is better than Twig

It's lame catchy title day, a more appropriate one would be "Think for yourself", but I want to get my point across.

This is a general purpose idea of course, I don't think there is any case in your life where you shouldn't think for yourself, but this particular post is about programming.

I just read someone (and I won't name names, it's not relevant) that was pondering using Dwoo or Twig in his CMS, who ended up picking Twig because, and I quote: "but twig says they're better than dwoo so ...". Now I sincerely couldn't care less if someone decides to use something else over Dwoo - which I'm working on in case you wouldn't know. It's your own choice, and even I wouldn't say Dwoo is the best choice for every damned purpose out there.

What bothers me though, is that obviously the guy read Fabien Potencier's article about php template engines, which was obviously not so much of an objective post, but that has already been discussed so let's not go to deep into it. Anyway, the guy most likely read it, and all it says about Dwoo to dismiss it is "Unfortunately, Dwoo has no sandbox feature and its core is not flexible enough". So.. out of this most enlightening comment, you decide to trust Fabien and just assume Twig is better? I just don't get it.

So again, please, just think for yourself.

December 08, 2009 // PHP // Post a comment

Major glob() fail

I just had the pleasure of discovering another of PHP's little quirks and since it's been almost a year since my last post, I thought it would be a good occasion.

Working on some personal project that lists a bunch of stuff on my hard drive, I found out that directories that contain square brackets (those []) don't return any results for the simple reason that glob reads [stuff] as a character class, just like in regular expressions. When you know it it makes perfect sense, but when you don't, the documentation is really not so helpful. Of course it mentions libc's glob() and unix shells, but not everyone knows what that implies at first glance.

My first reaction when I noticed that those directories were missing was to try and escape them with backslashes, which works on unix systems, but not on windows since the backslash is the directory separator. The cross platform solution is to enclose them in brackets (i.e. [[]), which effectively creates a character class with only the opening bracket in it, so it matches correctly.

I then wrote this glob_quote function which, just like preg_quote, escapes the meta characters that glob uses.

function glob_quote($str) { 
    $from = array( '[', '*', '?'); 
    $to = array('[[]', '[*]', '[?]'); 
    return str_replace($from, $to, $str); 
}

Another detail worth noting while I'm at it is that this problem also occurs when you do glob('*.txt') if your cwd contains brackets, since in this case the cwd is pre-pended to the pattern, the solution being to escape it as well as such:
glob(glob_quote(getcwd()).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'*.txt');

That's it for today, so until next year..

December 02, 2009 // PHP // Post a comment