Archive for September, 2008

HOWTO get the real host name of your server in PHP

September 21st, 2008

In PHP, to get the name of the web server, you can print $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]. However, if you use round-robin DNS or a load balancer, this will give you the name Apache thinks your machine is.

What if you want the real hostname — what you’d get from hostname or uname?
print gethostbyaddr("127.0.0.1");

That’s all. It sure beats the pants off:
print trim(`hostname`);

keywords: php hostname local computer server HTTP_HOST

Posted in tech | No Comments »

JavaScript: how to unescape HTML entities

September 20th, 2008

I was searching the web for JavaScript HTML entity unescaping code. I found lots of really bad ideas. Sound familiar? Some were quite complicated.

It looked like the scriptaculous guys had the right idea. However, all I could find was a cached page with no code. A quick peek inside prototype set me on the right track.

String.prototype.unescapeHtml = function () {
    var temp = document.createElement("div");
    temp.innerHTML = this;
    var result = temp.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
    temp.removeChild(temp.firstChild)
    return result;
}

And the code in action:

var hello = "Hello José";
alert(hello.unescapeHtml());

Posted in web | 3 Comments »