Not Your Type - PHP

Tired of handcrafting configuration file manipulation tools for your Web application? Save yourself some time with patConfiguration, a PHP class designed to assist developers with reading, writing and maintaining application configuration files.

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By: Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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January 29, 2003

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You'll remember, from a couple pages back, that patConfiguration supports a number of different data types for its configuration variables. This variable type can be set via the setConfigValue() method, and currently can be any one of "string", "integer", "boolean", "array" and "float".

Here's an example which demonstrates how strings, integers and Booleans work:

<?
// include class
require("patConfiguration.php");
// create patConfiguration 
object
$conf = new patConfiguration;
// set config file locations
$conf->setConfigDir("config");
// 
set config values
$conf->setConfigValue("screen.width", 500, "integer");
$conf->setConfigValue("font.face", 
"Verdana", "string");
$conf->setConfigValue("window.toolbar.visibility", true, 
"boolean");
// write file
$conf->writeConfigFile("config.xml", "xml", array("mode" 
=> "pretty"));
?>

Here's the XML output:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<configuration>
<path name="font">
<configValue 
name="face"
type="string">Verdana</configValue>
</path>
<path name="screen">
<configValue 
name="width" type="int">500</configValue>
</path>
<path name="window">
<path 
name="toolbar">
<configValue name="visibility"
type="bool">true</configValue>
</path>
</path>
</configuration>

Wanna use arrays in your configuration? patConfiguration supports those as well:

<?
// include class
require("patConfiguration.php");
// create patConfiguration 
object
$conf = new patConfiguration;
// set config file locations
$conf->setConfigDir("config");
// 
set config values
$conf->setConfigValue("friends", array("Rachel", "Ross", "Monica",
"Joey", 
"Chandler", "Phoebe"), "array");
// write file
$conf->writeConfigFile("config.xml", 
"xml", array("mode" => "pretty"));
?>

Here's the XML output,


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<configuration>
<configValue 
name="friends" type="array">
<configValue type="string">Rachel</configValue>
<configValue 
type="string">Ross</configValue>
<configValue type="string">Monica</configValue>
<configValue 
type="string">Joey</configValue>
<configValue type="string">Chandler</configValue>
<configValue 
type="string">Phoebe</configValue>
</configValue>
</configuration>

and here's the PHP output:


<?PHP
// Configuration generated by patConfiguration
$config = array();
$config["friends"] 
= array();
$config["friends"][0] = "Rachel";
$config["friends"][1] = "Ross";
$config["friends"][2] 
= "Monica";
$config["friends"][3] = "Joey";
$config["friends"][4] = "Chandler";
$config["friends"][5] 
= "Phoebe";
?>

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