Muthuswamy » PHP http://www.muthuswamy.in Web Developer Fri, 30 Apr 2010 05:55:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Special characters in Regular Expression http://www.muthuswamy.in/139/special-characters-in-regular-expression http://www.muthuswamy.in/139/special-characters-in-regular-expression#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:34:08 +0000 Muthuswamy K http://www.muthuswamy.in/?p=139 Today I faced a problem with my clients website when I used the regular expression technique that I explained in my post here. The problem raised because his website is in Swedish so the usual character pattern that I used to match was not working.

The pattern matching string used before was: <a [a-zA-Z0-9 /.?_=:"-]*>

But his website used characters like Õ, Ä, Û, é, and so on… To solve this problem I introduced another set of hex based pattern matching rule [\xC0-\xFF] This rule actually includes all the special alphabets (uppercase and lowercase).

So the new pattern matching rule for non-english websites will be:
<a [a-zA-Z\xC0-\xFF0-9 /.?_=:"-]*>

The tools that helped me today are:

  • Webmonkey Special Characters Reference – I was able to get the list of special characters that I need to concentrate and their decimal values.
  • My Scientific Calculator – To convert the decimal values to HEX values.
  • Free RegEx Testing Tool – A multi-platform free adobe air regular expression evaluation tool that helped me to test my ideas.

This is all for today. Will post my experiences like these often. If you have any comments, please let me know through the comments section below so I can improve this further.

]]> http://www.muthuswamy.in/139/special-characters-in-regular-expression/feed 2 Using CSS sliding window menu in Wordpress http://www.muthuswamy.in/119/using-css-sliding-window-menu-in-wordpress http://www.muthuswamy.in/119/using-css-sliding-window-menu-in-wordpress#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:37:00 +0000 Muthuswamy K http://www.muthuswamy.in/?p=119 If you are one among the one who hate IE6 being still alive, you will understand the problem that I am trying to solve here. A sliding window technique is a CSS approach to make the menu items with unusual styling(rounded corners, bite corners, etc,.). This is attained by using 2 images. To know more about CSS sliding window menus with examples visit Dynamic Drive.

This technique requires two levels of markup:

Because of this, you need to add and extra <span></span> wrap for your menu content or you can use the <li> and <a> as pairs, but the problem raises in IE6 as IE6 does not support CSS hover for <li>. Adding an extra span can be easy for a static site, but in wordpress the pages or categories that are usually used as page items are generated by built-in functions that do no provide options to add the extra <span> tag for versions older than wordpress 2.7. Sadly there are still some people who are using older versions of wordpress, so make your theme suit them all by using this technique.

Here is a simple PHP code that can save you from this problem:

This code will get the page list from the “wp_list_pages” function and adds the wrapping<span> and </span> tags and prints then on the page. You can use the same technique for functions like:

  • wp_list_pages
  • wp_list_categories
  • wp_list_bookmarks
  • wp_list_authors

Please leave your comments and suggestions related to this topic in the comments section.

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