I read about variable variables in PHP's official documentation.

Here's a sample:

<?php
    $a = "hello";
    // Remove special characters and tags to prevent it from crashing.
    $foo = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', $$a);
    echo $foo;
?>

Not sure if this is a good practice but it sure gets the job done!

If you're facing this error while trying to download a file from your server, it's most probably the SSL certificate that has been hosted on your server isn't correctly verified or maybe, you're using OpenSSL on a server running PHP 5.6.

As per the documentation, there are some changes that can be made to resolve it, like the following method:

<?php
public function foo(Request $request) {
    $arrContextOptions = array(
        "ssl" => array(
            "verify_peer" => false,
            "verify_peer_name" => false,
        ),
    );
    return Response::make(file_get_contents(asset('pdf/file.pdf'), false, stream_context_create($arrContextOptions)), 200, [
        'Content-Type' => 'application/pdf',
        'Content-Disposition' => 'inline; filename="file.pdf"',
    ]);
}
?>

Although, I won't recommend this unless you are testing it on a localhost environment as it's not secure and could have significant security implications because disabling verification can permit a Man in the Middle attack to take place.

Use it at your own risk!

This error is annoying and mostly happens if the data directory is missing under the storage/framework/cache/data directory. For some reason, this folder doesn't exist by default.

To resolve it, just manually create the data directory under the storage/framework/cache/data directory and it should fix the issue.

Using plain Regular Expressions, you can exclude certain slug from your routes, try adding the following to your routes/web.php file:

<?php
    Route::match(array('GET', 'POST'), '/{slug}', 'YourController@index')->name('page')->where('slug', '^(?!pattern).*$');
?>

Hope you found this useful!

Using Carbon's createFromFormat() method is basically a wrapper for DateTime::createFromFormat(), the main difference between the two methods is that you can add a timezone to Carbon's method.

Here's a sample on how you can convert to date using timestamp using Carbon:

<?php
    function formatDate(Request $request) {
        return \Carbon\Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $request->date)->format('Y-m-d');
    }
?>

Hope you found this useful!

Hosted your website on a Shared Hosting Server and got limited access to clear the cache on your project?

Open up routes/web.php and create this route:

<?php
Route::get('/clearcache', function(){
    \Artisan::run('config:clear');
    \Artisan::run('cache:clear');
    \Artisan::run('view:clear');
    \Artisan::run('route:clear');
    \Artisan::run('config:cache');
});
?>

Just type the URL and it will clear all existing cache from the project.

Hope this helps you out!

Today, I was debugging a piece of code that is supposed to return a list of data based on the year, the funny thing is that the data was being returned on the development server but not on the production one.

Weird, so I opened up MySQL Workbench and wrote a simple query to see if the dates were being returned because who knows maybe they weren't stored at all.

SELECT YEAR(date_posted) FROM posts;

The values returned were null. Now, that's strange because the dates were present in the column. So, I took a deep look and figured out that the dates were stored in VARCHAR instead of DATETIME data type! 😔

Luckily, I figured that there's a way to resolve this by STR_TO_DATE() function:

SELECT YEAR(STR_TO_DATE(date_posted, '%Y-%m-%d')) FROM posts;

Bam! The results were coming now! 😌

Hope this helps you out!

Last month, I was configuring an Ubuntu Server to deploy a client's project that uses MySQL 8.0 and PHP 7.2. So, I installed the necessary dependencies and finally installed MySQL 8.0, created a new schema and imported the database tables required for the project.

Next, I typed the project URL and ran into this error:

Unable to load plugin 'caching_sha2_password'

If you're running PHP 7.2 and facing this error, you should know that PHP 7.2 doesn't support native password authentication by default. But it's a simple fix, all you have to do is either one of the following:

1. Alter the current user's authentication to native password
2. Create a new user with native password authentication

Alter the current user's authentication to native password

ALTER USER 'your_user'@'your_server_host' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_password';

Create a new user with native password authentication

CREATE USER 'your_user'@'your_server_host ' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_password'

For the changes to take effect, you need to reload the privileges by typing the following:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Hope this helps you out!