fileinfo for PHP on Leopard

Development, , , , , , ,

Currently I had to use the fileinfo-Package on my development-system which is a MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.5 with Marc Lianages PHP-Package.

But sadly that does not contain the fileinfo-extension.

No Problem I thought: Installing a PECL-Extension isn’t hard work.

At least if it works….

Of course I ran into the problem that I couldn’t compile the fileinfo extension due to the following error-message

configure: error: Please reinstall the libmagic distribution
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/download/Fileinfo-1.0.4/configure' failed

I can’t be the only one that ran into the problem, I thought. And so it was.

While searching the internet, I generally found two ways to solve the problem.

  1. Use PHP 5.3, that already contains the package
  2. Install a complete second OperatingSystem beneath a perfectly working MacOS. Here for instance I found a way to get the installation working by installing the complete fink-package.

Using PHP 5.3 was no option for me, as we are developing for PHP5.2 and installing a second Operating System seemed somewhat oversized for the simple task of installing a small PHP-extension.

Back to the roots

So what was the original problem again? A missing installation of the libmagic-library. Event though the info-binary is installed on the MacOS I’m running, a shared libmagic-Library is missing.

So what the hell, why not compile one?

Continue reading fileinfo for PHP on Leopard →

Hyphenate texts with PHP

Development, , , ,

Hyphenation is something not widely used on the internet.

But sometimes it is something you need to do in Browser-based applications.

Just think of a PDF-File created on the fly by an application and the text is hyphenated in very strange ways or not at all. All just because of an algorithm that might hyphenate english texts in one way or an other but certainly not german, french or other texts.

But it is possible with a bit of LaTeX (don’t worry, you need no kowledge of that whatsoever)
Continue reading Hyphenate texts with PHP →

Shorten Texts via JavaScript

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One day I ran into the trouble of having labes too long for the space they should go into.

In this special case I had a navigation area with a width of 150 pixel but the strings that had to go into the navigation where much longer.

So I decided that shortening the Labels by replacing the middle part by a ‘…’ would do the trick.

Here is the code for it.

fitText : function(element){
    cn=element.childNodes;     
    node=document.createElement('div');     
    node.setStyle({'float':'left',visibility:'visible','font-weight':700});
    document.body.appendChild(node);
    for(var i=0;i<cn.length;i++){
        if(cn[i].nodeType != Node.TEXT_NODE){
            continue;
        }
        origText=cn[i].data;
        text=cn[i].data.trim();
        if ( text == ''){
            continue;
        }         
        wo=element.getInnerWidth();         
	counter=0;         
	fits=true;         
	do{
            mid=Math.ceil(text.length/2);
            text1=text.substring(0,mid-counter);
            text2=text.substring(mid+counter);
            text=text1+text2;
            newText=text1+'...'+text2;
            tn=document.createTextNode(newText); 
            node.appendChild(tn);
            w=node.getInnerWidth();
            if (w>wo){ 
                fits=false;
            }
            node.removeChild(tn);
            counter++;
        } while((w>wo)&&(text.length>0))
        if ( ! fits ){
            cn[i].replaceData(0,origText.length,newText);
            element.setAttribute('title',origText);
        }
    }
    document.body.removeChild(node);
    return true; 
}

This code requires the Prototype API.

And I believe that there are a lot of possibilities to improve that bit of JavaScript.