Beware easy shortcuts

If you need to replace a character, make sure you replace it with the correct character!

I recently made the mistake of replacing a comma (,) with , That isn't the correct ascii character. , is.

And because I do my IE testing last, I didn't pick it up. Just thought it'd be a good heads up for anyone who didn't realise it either.

Validating an email address in PHP

Just a little post, because most of the top Google results point to old pages that aren't correct.

Basically, I wanted to validate some input to see if it was a valid email address. Rather than rely on a regular expression, I knew there was a better way of doing it. In PHP at least.

So, the function you're looking for is filter_var(). If you're doing it with $_POST or $_GET you can instead use filter_input().

In my case, it's verifying that an API is providing me with a valid email, as somebody at the other end likes to chuck in "unsubscribed" to the email field. So the code looks similar to this.

if (false === filter_var($valueToCheck, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) ) {
    // This is *not* an email address
} else {
   // This *is* an email address
}

Amazon cloud servers

They may sound like the silver bullet to kill all silver bullets.

But judging from the swearing coming from the Systems Administrator from the other side of the desk lately, I think I may steer clear of them for a little while yet.