0 PHP serialization

By Adam Gaskins

0

PHP serialization

Posted in

Recently, I was working on a PHP script for my Dad which reads some data, and will make a report on the changes of the data over time. To save the reports, I needed some way to export an array into a file and then read it back from the file in a separate script and have it exactly the same.

Thats what the serialize function does in PHP. It takes any argument, and converts it to a string. Then you can unserialize the string, and get your original object. So I just serialized my array and saved it to a file:


$string = serialize($array);
file_put_contents("saved_data.txt");


and saved it to a text document, and when I wanted to access the data:


unserialize(file_get_contents("saved_data.txt"));


If you have more than one object you want to serialize, you can put all of it in an array, and serialize the array.


$string_1 = "Hello World";
$string_2 = "What are you doing?";
$string_12 = serialize(array($string_1,$string_2))

0 Blender Tutorial Compilation

By Adam Gaskins

0

Blender Tutorial Compilation

Posted in

Finally getting tired of searching google and youtube for useful Blender tutorials, Adam Gaskins creates an online Blender Tutorial Compilation. Anybody can access it and suggest/create tutorials for it.

http://www.theadamgaskins.com/Blender/

Complete with a mailing list for the most popular/best tutorials!

As of now, I only have like 20 some tutorials. So any suggestions are readily accepted!

The basic guidelines for tutorials are:

• Audio voiceover: Unless the tutorial is very good, it won't be accepted without a useful audio voiceover. This is mainly what makes or breaks a tutorial.
• Straightforwardness: An annoying thing with some tutorials, is they aren't straightforward; they're wobbly backwards. Make your tutorials as easy to understand as possible. Walk yourself through your tutorial before you record it. This also can make or break a tutorial
• Good Quality: This isn't a requirement, but if you have a 320x480 resolution tutorial, it most likely won't be accepted.

If a tutorial meets the first two requirements, and the last one more or less, then it will most likely be added on the site.

0 Python Tutorial 4: File IO

By Adam Gaskins

0

Python Tutorial 4: File IO

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If you have worked with PHP or Perl, then file IO should be familiar. To edit/read a file, you need a file object. To get the file object, you have to open the file.

fileObject = open("file.ext", "r")
print fileObject.read()

But what if you wanted to start reading from the middle of the file? In python, this is possible. To set the file read cursor, you must use the seek function:

fileObject.seek(offset,where)

where is optional, and it tells the compiler where to start from in the file. If where is 0, then it puts the cursor at offset characters from the start of the file. If it is 1, the characters are counted form where the cursor is currently. If 2, then they are counted from the end of the file. If where is not specified, then the compiler uses 0.

The offset [as previously explained] tells the compiler how far from where to set the cursor. Negative numbers are acceptable

• fileObject.seek(15,0) would move the cursor 15 characters from the beginning of the file
• fileObject.seek(15,1) would move the cursor 15 characters to the right from its current position
• fileObject.seek(-15,2) would move the cursor 15 characters away from the end of the file

Notice the negative sign before the fifteen in the last example.

seek, read, and open are the most basic IO functions. Lets look at some more: tell(), readline(), readlines(), write() and close()

tell() gets the position of the cursor in the file, which [as shown above] can be set with seek().

cursorPos = fileObject.tell()

The readline() function reads from the cursor position to the end of the line. The readlines() function reads from the cursor position to the end of the file, and returns an array with each line in a separate index. You will never guess what the write() function does. Ok, you might if you are really smart. Assuming you arn't really smart, I'll tell you what it does. It writes to the file. It writes at the cursor position, overwriting any characters infront of it, like if you press the Insert button in Microsoft Word and type. The close() function closes the file object so you can't read or write to it anymore without reopening the file. You should always remember to do this because if you don't, then the changes you made most likely won't effect the file.

Now lets talk about pickles. No I'm not being random; Pickles are a way in python to save objects to files. You can save almost any object to a file with pickles. Inorder to use them, though, you have to import them with the statement: import pickle. Then you use the pickle.dump() function to save them to the file:

import pickle

numbers = ["one",2,"three","four",5,"can you count?"]

fileObject = open("numbers.txt", "w")

pickle.dump(numbers,fileObject)

fileObject.close()

To read a pickle back in, you use the pickle.load() function:

import pickle

fileObject = open("numbers.txt", "r")

numbers = pickle.load(fileObject)

fileObject.close()

for item in numbers

    print item

The main con with pickles is that you can't save more than one object to a file. A way around this would be to put all the objects into an array, and then save the array to the file.

That concludes my fourth python tutorial.

0 Python Tutorial 3: Loops and Conditionals

By Adam Gaskins

0

Python Tutorial 3: Loops and Conditionals

Posted in

Like I said in my First Python Tutorial, there are no brackets [ { and } ] ; Python uses indentation instead.

    a = 0

    while a < 10:

        a = a + 1

        print a

    print "End of loop"

Everything after the while a < 10: statement that is indented is repeated until a is no longer smaller than 10. Everytime through the loop, a is incremented, and then printed. The output of this program:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

End of loop

Notice that "End of loop" is only printed once. That is because it is not indented, and hence comes after the while loop ends. Here is the basic form for the while loop:


while {condition that the loop continues}:
    {what to do in the loop}
    {have it indented, usually for spaces}
{the code here is not looped}
{because it isn't indented}

The if statement is rather similar


if(condition)
    statements
else
    statements




This can be very useful for many things


if(enteredPassword == correctPassword)
    login()
else
    print "Incorrect password";

0 Python Tutorial 2: Variables

By Adam Gaskins

0

Python Tutorial 2: Variables

Posted in

In this tutorial, we’ll study variables. Python variables are related the closest to PHP and Perl, except they don’t start with any symbols. In Python, both concatenation and addition are done with +. All the others you would expect.

+	Addition / Concatenation
-	Subtraction
*	Multiplication
/	Division
%	Modulos
**	Powers

Python variables are generic; you don’t have to declare them with a type [int,string,char etc...] or with var, you just simply use them. A variable can hold a number at one point, and later in the program hold a string of characters.


    varone = 5
    vartwo = 6


After assigning the variables, you can add them together and store them in another variable:


    varthree = varone + vartwo



This assigns varthree to 11. You can subtract, multiply, and divide in the same way. You can divide vartwo in half like this:

    vartwo /= 2

This takes vartwo, divides it by two, then assigns it back to vartwo. So since we had vartwo set to 6, it would now be set to 3. You can multiply by two with *=, add two with +=, subtract two with -= etc...

Strings are slightly different.

    stringone = "Hello"
    stringtwo = "World"
    greeting = stringone + " " + stringtwo

This gives the variable greeting the value "Hello World". Commas do virtually the same thing as + with strings, except commas insert spaces. The above greeting assignment does the same thing as the following:

    greeting = stringone,stringtwo