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In this post I would like to present a few PHP functions which I created for projects I worked on and which I found very useful many times.
 
The functions are not super-advanced, but really handy. You can use them freely as they all are licensed under MIT.
 
I think there is a big chance you will find them useful too. If you do- please leave a comment, thanks!
 
 
 
 

Nice date

This function shows date formatted as “Y-m-d” for dates older than today or “today H:i” for today’s dates.

function niceDate($date)
	{
		if (substr($date, 0, 10) == date('Y-m-d'))
		{
			return 'today, ' . substr($date, 11, 5);
		}
		return substr($date, 0, 10);
	}

File icon

Here’s a function which returns image icon for a set of predefined file types (based on extension).

function makeIcon($file)
{
	$ico = substr($file, strrpos($file, '.'));
	switch ($ico)
	{
		case 'pdf':
		case 'doc':
		case 'rtf':	$icon = 'document.png'; break;
		case 'zip':
		case 'rar':
		case '7z' :
		case 'tar':
		case 'gz' : $icon = 'archive.png'; break;
		default   : $icon = 'default.png'; break;
	}
	return $icon;
}

Shorten text

Make text shorten, but don’t cut words!

function shorten($str, $len = 50)
	{
		$cut = "\x1\x2\x3";
		$str = strip_tags($str);
		list($str) = explode($cut, wordwrap($str, $len, $cut));
		return $str;
	}

List files in a directory

This function lists files in a directory. It ignores subdirectories.

function scandir2($dir)
{
	$out = array();
	if (is_dir($dir))
	{
	    if ($dh = opendir($dir))
		{
	        while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false)
			{
	            if ($file == '.' or $file == '..') continue;

				if (!is_dir($dir . '/'. $file))
	            {
				    $out[] = $dir . '/' . $file;
				}
	        }
	        closedir($dh);
	    }
	}
	sort($out);
	return $out;
}

Return next value from a set of values

Given a set of values it returns next value each time it is called. Example:
cycle(‘one’,'two’); cycle(‘one’,'two’); cycle(‘one’,'two’);
will print ‘one’, then ‘two’, then ‘one’.
Can be used in HTML templates:

<?php for ($i=0; $i<5; $i++) { ?>
<div style="color: <?php cycle('red','white','blue') ?>">Text here</div>
<?php } ?>

function cycle()
{
	global $cycleCounter;
	$cycleCounter = isset($cycleCounter) ? $cycleCounter+1 : 0;
	$cycleCounter = $cycleCounter % func_num_args();

	echo func_get_arg($cycleCounter);
}