John's hacks

I decided I might start documenting some hacks I've come across in my travels which I think are neat.

Removing last comma (PHP)

Sometimes you're processing a list to build a string and you want a comma after all items except the last one. You can do that like this:

// 2020-04-14 jj5 - it's important to handle this case...
//
if ( count( $list ) === 0 ) { return 'list is empty'; }

$result = 'my list: ';
$is_first = true;

foreach ( $list as $item ) {

  if ( $is_first ) {

    $is_first = false;

  }
  else {

    $result .= ', ';

  }

  $result .= $item;

}

return $result . '.';

But that can be simplified like this:

// 2020-04-14 jj5 - it's important to handle this case...
//
if ( count( $list ) === 0 ) { return 'list is empty'; }

$result = 'my list: ';

foreach ( $list as $item ) {

  $result .= "$item, ";

}

// 2020-04-14 jj5 - the neat hack is dropping the last two characters here...
//
return substr( $result, 0, -2 ) . '.';

Although the whole thing can often (but not always) be simplified as something like this (you might also need to check for an empty list):

return 'my list: ' . implode( ', ', $list ) . '.';

Passing shell args (PHP)

Put your args in $args and use escapeshellarg() to escape them...

$args = join( ' ', array_map( 'escapeshellarg', $args ) );

exec( "$program $args" );

Passing shell args (BASH)

As can be seen for example here.

local args=();
args+=( --human-readable );
args+=( --acls --xattrs );
args+=( --recursive --del --force );
args+=( --times --executability --perms );
args+=( --links --hard-links --sparse );
args+=( --numeric-ids --owner --group );
args+=( --compress-level=6 );
whatever "${args[@]}";