Archive of posts filed under the Web Development category.

Nice article about the inputmode attribute

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I wasn’t aware of the inputmode-attribute for input or textarea elements in HTML, but this excellent article on CSS-Tricks opened up a new world.

<input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric”>
on an Android device

Ensure your mobile users have a good experience by using inputmode rather than <input type="number" ...> etc. inputmode="numeric" can be used with maxlength, minlength and pattern attributes and therefore allows for a more controlled input.

Note: you probably want to add your own validation checks, as the browser will not do any validation with <input type="text" ...>.

How to ignore @ errors in a custom PHP error handler

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In my PHP pages, I’m using a custom error handler, to make potential errors a bit more user-friendly. However, in some very particular cases, I don’t want an error to be raised (e.g. I’m logging all errors to a server file, but if writing to that file does not work for whatever reason, I don’t want to bother the user with it). In those cases, I’m using the @ error-control operator to ignore any error:
@error_log($error_trace.' ['.str_replace("\n",'\n',$error_message).'] ['.str_replace("\n",'\n',$error_data)."]\n",3,ERROR_LOG);

The @ error-control operator, However, even with @, the custom error handler is still triggered.

Thanks to this blog post I learned that error_reporting is 0 if the statement that caused the error was prepended by the @ error-control operator. So the solution is to add:
if (error_reporting() === 0) {
// continue script execution, skipping standard PHP error handler  (e.g.when using @ in front of an expression)
return true;
}

to the custom error handler

PHP setlocale depends on underlying system (XAMPP on Windows)

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I’m maintaining a few websites, so I have a local webserver running to do testing and debugging. Until recently, I was using IIS on my Windows laptop. However, I ditched IIS a while ago, replacing it with XAMPP. This is much closer to the environment that’s running the websites (e.g. I can use .htaccess directly, rather than converting it to a web.config file).

This all worked fine, except for setlocale in PHP. I wanted to use Dutch (Belgian), but I could not get
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_BE');
to work on my local machine.

I searched the web, but did not find any useful information. So I looked at the PHP setlocale helpinfo again, and noticed the Tip in the Notes: Windows users will find useful information about locale strings at Microsoft’s MSDN website.

After checking, it turned out that Microsoft decided to go for another “standard”, so ‘nl_BE’ was not recognized. To use Dutch on Windows, I needed
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nld_nld');

Oh well…