The purpose of this was to take a title, and create something url safe and in the fashion a client was wanting. The first function was old code, so don’t blame me.

function cleanUrl($url)
{
  $find =        array('/--/', '/ - /','/ /', '/!/', '/"/', "/'/", '/--/');
  $replace =    array('-', '-', '-', '', '', '', '-');

  $result = strtr($url, "`~@#$%^&*()_=+|[]{};:,./<>?", "---------------------------");

  return strtolower(preg_replace($find, $replace, strip_tags(stripslashes(trim($result)))));
}

Isn’t it horrible?

I rewrote the function to…

function cleanUrl($url)
{
  $url = strtolower($url);

  $url = preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9\s+]/", '', $url);
  $url = preg_replace("/[\s]{1,}/", '-', $url);

  return $url;
}

That makes me happier.

I should have gotten out to play disc golf while the weather was beautiful, I just didn’t feel too hot.

Called my sister Meagan a few times, her voicemail is picking up so I’m yelling in a demonic sounding voice and hanging up. Hopefully it freaks them out a bit. If not, well, no loss.

Work is going well, moving forward on some things and looking good.

Snapped a great picture of my brother in law, and his wifes brother being dorks. Put it up on my facebook in the mobile uploads.

This turned into more of a journal entry, rock on.

Here’s a simple function to return the Ewerl url. It’s only being used for the main url, but could easily be adjusted to return an array. I just didn’t have a need for it in my case at this time.

/**
 * Returns an Ewerl url if available.
 * Otherwise the original that was passed in.
 * Returns false if..
 * 1. JSON extension isn't installed.
 * 2. No url was entered.
 * 3. No response from server.
 *
 * @todo Add URL validation.
 *
 * @param string $url
 * @return string URL, or false.
 * @author Casey Wilson 
 */
function getEwerl($url) {
	/**
	 * Verify JSON extension is loaded.
	 */
	if (!extension_loaded('JSON')) return false;

	/**
	 * Url wasn't passed
	 */
	if (!$url) return false;

	/**
	 * Assign / Prep vars.
	 */
	$postUrl = 'http://ewerl.com/api/v1/make/url=';
	$urlEncoded = base64_encode($url);

	$response = file_get_contents($postUrl . $urlEncoded);

	if (!$response) {
		return $url;
	}

	/**
	 * Should have returned a JSON object.
	 */
	$jsonObj = json_decode($response);

	/**
	 * If either Status not set, or status is false, return original url.
	 */
	if (!isset($jsonObj->status) || $jsonObj->status == 'FALSE') {
		return $url;
	}

	return $jsonObj->url_main;
}

I’ve never been a JS guy, never been in a position to really need to do much with it since I’ve basically always been a backend coder. I need to really jump in there, get a good feel for both JS and jQuery. So far though, I can say I’m really starting to like it, only been at it a few days thus far so we’ll see here soon what the final say is.

Thanks to good friends, and long late night chats with people smarter than I.

The open source community as a whole rocks.

Figured I’d post something up here that may be useful to someone else.

Code was updated.

/**
 * Get TinyUrl for $url
 *
 * @param string $url Must be a valid url
 */
function getTinyUrl($url) {
	if (! $url) {
		return false;
	}

	if (strlen ( $url ) < 30) {
		return $url;
	}

	$response = file_get_contents ( 'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=' . $url );

	return ($response) ? $response : $url;
}

I gave him a link in the blogroll, check out his site. He’s written some very nice articles on Web Scraping.

Night!