PHP

PHP5’s XMLReader – which I used for my JSON-Like XML post, doesn’t implement a ‘clone’ handler, which came as quite a shock when I attempted to implement a wrapper class that would allow me to push values back into the stream when I had to read-ahead to implement ‘nested data structures’ as suggested by Davey. I had a hard time finding a good example of how to internally implement clone (even Sara Golemon’s book only gives it a brief mention¹), but I finally came up with something – I’m building it now to see how well it works, or even if it works at all.

¹ zend_object_value clone_obj(zval *object TSRMLS_DC) – Used to generate a new object copied from an already instantiated one. The default behavior is to create a new object instance, associate the original’s handler table with it, copy the properties table and, if the class entry for the object in question defines a __clone() method, call that to allow the new object to perform additional duplication work.

#phpc on Freenode had a discussion tonight about how there’s nothing in XML that’s quite as simple as JSON for encoding types. I came up with this off-the-cuff – as opposed to WDDX, this is more JSON-like in that each ‘XML Document’ encodes only a single value – but that value might be mapped to any of the built-in types.
Of course, the <object> stuff would only work with pretty simple objects – but the fact that it tries at all to instance a class is a step beyond what JSON does, which is ALWAYS an instance of stdClass. You could drop this extra ‘feature’ by remove removing line 43 ($class = …) and changing line 44 to:
[highlight lang=php]$data = new stdClass;[/highlight]

[highlight lang=php] public function offsetSet($key, $value) { if ($key === NULL) return $this->push($value); $this->throwEx(array(‘Do not directly set indices in a %s, use push() instead’, CLASS)); return false; }
[/highlight] This allows the use of PHP’s ‘push’ syntax: $foo[] = ‘bar’;
Full class after the jump.

I liked the SPL I used in my last post, so I cracked open my Python Cookbook to a random location and decided to try and implement whatever it landed on in PHP using SPL – that led to the following implementation of a ring buffer.
There certain may be better ways to do it, but this was my first pass, and I think it behaves much how you’d expect a ring buffer to.

Someone in ##PHP was looking for an array that had ‘case-insensitive’ keys, so I threw this together using SPL