If you're a developer working in the Middle East, it's quite common that you'll work on a project that bilingual, in our case, it's english and arabic.

In my opinion, it's not aesthetically pleasing and logical to have english numbers in arabic text, so, write a simple helper function to convert the numerals from english to arabic:

<?php
function convertEnglishToArabicNumerals($str) {
    if (\App::getLocale() == 'ar') {
        $westernArabic = array('0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9');
        $easternArabic = array('٠', '١', '٢', '٣', '٤', '٥', '٦', '٧', '٨', '٩');
        $str = str_replace($westernArabic, $easternArabic, $str);
    }
    return $str;
}
?>

And since most browsers can handle RTL, you don't have to worry about how the arabic numerals are being displayed in your application.

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!

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!

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!

Do you work on a project with multiple Git branches but don't know which one you're in? Open your .bashrc file and add this:

force_color_prompt=yes
color_prompt=yes

parse_git_branch() {
 git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
 PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[01;31m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
 PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w$(parse_git_branch)\$ '
fi

unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

parse_git_branch() {
    git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}

export PS1="\u@\h \[\e[32m\]\w \[\e[91m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\e[00m\]$ "

Save the file and execute this command for your changes to take effect:

source ~/.bashrc

Now, you should see your colors in your Bash prompt along with the Git branch that you're working on (Note: this will be shown if you're in a project that uses a Git repository).

Hope this helps you out!

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!