Andy's blog o' goodness

I’m sure you’ve seen the simple email address format validation function; they’re usually a simple regular expressing that just check the address portion (the user@example.org bit). That’s really only a bit of the validation that should be done. The RFC822 specs detail that the format of email addresses can be much larger, for example, it could be something like “Andrew...

Create a random thumbnail of a video file Looking at sites like YouTube, you may think it’s quite hard to create a lot of different thumbnails from video files, and have them from random times within that file. But, no, it’s not! As this article shows, by using the very fabulous FFmpeg library, it’s actually a very short amount of...

This simple function allows you to generate a random registration key in the format, ‘1224-54B1-7D35-5EF7’. [php]function registration_key() { return strtoupper(substr(chunk_split(sprintf(‘%03d%s’, rand(0,999), uniqid(”)), 4, ‘-‘), 0, -1)); }[/php]

You’ve probably seen this before, if not a thousand times, but here’s a simple function to check the format of a UK postcode. [code lang=”php”]function valid_uk_postcode($postcode) { return (preg_match(‘/^([A-PR-UWYZ][A-HK-Y0-9][AEHMNPRTVXY0-9]?[ABEHMNPRVWXY0-9]? {0,2}[0-9][ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}|GIR 0AA)$/i’, $postcode)) ? true : false; }[/code]