How To Refresh Page Using PHP

Let’s see how to do this by means of an example. The following piece of code will refresh the page after 5 seconds. You may change it as per your needs.

Example:

echo 'This page will be refreshed after 5 seconds.';
echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5">';

To use the above code, simply copy the second line and change the seconds value from 5 to any value you desire.

Your Turn!

Do you know of any other ways to refresh a page using PHP? Feel free to suggest by commenting below.

How To Limit String Using Word Count

Let’s see how to do this with an example.

Example: Consider the following string on which we apply word limit using PHP

This is a custom string. We are now going to apply PHP functions on this and return only the portion of the string based upon the word count.

Now let’s limit the above string to a word count of 10 and then return the result. Use the following code to do so:

<?php 
function word_limiter($string, $limit) 
{ 
	//break string based upon space
	$str_array = explode(" ", $string); 

	//return the extracted string with our word limit in place
	return implode(" ", array_splice($str_array, 0, $limit)); 
}

$string = 'This is a custom string. We are now going to apply PHP functions on this and return only the portion of the string based upon the word count.';

$word_limit = 10; //Change this based upon your needs

echo word_limiter($string, $word_limit);
?>

 Output:

This is a custom string. We are now going to

If you count the number of word in the above Output, you will notice that there are only 10 words. This is exactly what we wanted.

That’s it!

Do you know of any other ways to limit string using word count in PHP? Feel free to suggest by commenting below.

Examples On How To Remove File Or Delete File Using PHP

To do this, we simply use the “unlink” function. So what unlink simply does is it “Deletes a file”. That’s it! Nothing more!

Command:

unlink( $filename );

Example: Using PHP to delete a file with the help of unlink function

In this example, I am going to first create a sample test file and then once it is created in the following steps, I will delete the file using PHP.

<?php
$temp_file_name = tempnam ('tmp/', "Test"); 

if( $temp_file_name )
{
	echo 'File successfully CREATED.<br />';	
}
else
{
	echo 'Unable to CREATE file.<br />';		
}

$fp = fopen($temp_file_name, "w"); 
fwrite($fp, 'Some sample content'); 
fclose($fp); 				

$delete_result = unlink($temp_file_name); 

if( $delete_result )
{
	echo 'File successfully DELETED.<br />';	
}
else
{
	echo 'Unable to DELETE the file.<br />';		
}
?>

If you have tried the demo, you will notice that first, the file is created & in the succeeding step, the file is deleted. If you have not yet tried the demo, then do it by clicking the button below.

Your Turn!
Do you know of any other ways of using PHP to delete file or remove a file? Feel free to suggest by commenting below.

Using PHP to Remove Duplicate Values From Array

Let’s consider that we have an array that contains fruits names. One of the fruits is now duplicated in the array and we would like to remove this duplicated value. Consider the following array below:

$my_fruits_array = array('apple', 'mango', 'grapes', 'pineapple', 'apple', 'guava', 'apple');

As you can see in the above array, the fruit “apple” appears thrice i.e. it is duplicated twice. So now  we would like to retain only the first occurrence of “apple” and remove the other two duplicate values from the array.

Example 1 – Remove duplicates from array using PHP

<?php 

echo 'Example 1: Removing a value from the array - Remove value "apple" <br />';

//Declare an array
$my_fruits_array = array('apple', 'mango', 'grapes', 'pineapple', 'apple', 'guava', 'apple');

//Print the contents of the array.
echo 'Following are the original array contents:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array);
echo '</pre>';

//Remove duplicated "apple" value from array
$my_fruits_array_new = array_unique($my_fruits_array);

//Print the contents of the array.
echo 'Following are the array contents AFTER removing the duplicate values from array:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array_new);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Example 2 – Delete Duplicates From Array Using PHP

<?php

echo '<br />Example 2: Removing a value from the array - Remove value "grapes" <br />';

$my_fruits_array = array('apple', 'mango', 'grapes', 'pineapple', 'apple', 'guava', 'apple');

//Print the contents of the array.
echo 'Following are the original array contents:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array);
echo '</pre>';

//Remove "apple" value from array
$my_fruits_array_new = array_map('unserialize', array_unique(array_map('serialize', $my_fruits_array)));

//Print the contents of the array. 
echo 'Following are the array contents AFTER removing the value from array:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array_new);
echo '</pre>';

?>

That’s it!

Do you know of any other ways to use PHP to delete duplicate values from array? Feel free to share by commenting below.

Examples On Using PHP To Remove Whitespace From String

In order to see “how to remove white spaces from string using PHP“, let’s assume that we have some sample string and it contains spaces, tabs, carriage returns, etc. We will now remove these white spaces from this string.

Example: Using PHP to remove white spaces from string

<?php

$content = "Hello, How are you doing today?		Ok ---    I am going 		...GREAT!!! 

How about yourself?
";

echo 'Original Content:'; echo '<br />';
echo '<pre>'.$content.'</pre>';
echo '<br />';

//Remove all whitespaces from string using the function below
$new_content = preg_replace('/\s+/', '', $content);

echo 'New Content:'; echo '<br />';
echo '<pre>'.$new_content.'</pre>';
echo '<br />';

?>

That’s it!

Do you know of any other ways to remove whitespace from string using PHP? Feel free to suggest by commenting below.

How to use PHP to Remove Last Array Element / Item

Let’s assume that we an array in PHP, that contains the fruit names. So in this example, we will see how to remove the last item from this fruits array.

Example: Remove last element from an array using PHP

<?php 
//Declare an empty array
$my_fruits_array = array('apple', 'mango', 'grapes', 'pineapple');

//Print the contents of the array. Use the <pre> tags to output the array in readable format.
echo 'Following are the original array contents:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array);
echo '</pre>';

//Remove Last Element From Array Using PHP
array_pop($my_fruits_array);

//Print the contents of the array. Use the <pre> tags to output the array in readable format.
echo 'Following are the array contents AFTER removing the last item from array:<br />';
echo '<pre>';
print_r($my_fruits_array);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Simple, isn’t it?

Do you know of any other ways to use PHP to remove last array element? Feel free to suggest by commenting below.