The xdiff extension is a great way to monitor and patch files or strings containing differences between different revisions. This has proven to be very useful for me on a project where I needed to implement a monitoring system for an editor. The man wanted to be able to track the historic contribution that each of his authors and proofreaders had on an article. Basically it was a git tool for journalists.

While xdiff can also do binary pacthing, I won't be focusing on that in this tutorial. Instead I will show you how to install and use the extension to compare strings.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use two of the lesser known PHP functions (metaphone($str) and levenshtein($str1, $str2)) to implement a "sounds like" search using PHP. By putting these two functions to good use, you will get exceptional results when matching phrases that contain spelling mistakes or simply 'sound similar'.

This post is to give you a few tips that you should remember when dealing with loops in PHP. You will learn why it is bad practice to initialize variables inside a loop, why a do-while can cause headaches if one doesn't understand it properly, when for loops should replace foreach and some more interesting loop gotchas.

One of my clients, a children e-books publisher, recently asked if I can help him modify MARC records for their library. As I had no idea what a MARC record is I started off here and soon I found that there's a PEAR package that can be used to read and write MARC files.

I will not go into what a MARC record is and what it is used for because if you are reading this article you probably already know that. In this article I will focus on how one can use the "File_MARC" PEAR package to modify/update the fields in a MARC file.