Archive for March 2009
Microsoft releases IE8
IE8 has been in beta for some time and I actually installed the beta version and for the time I used it I had no problems.
Whilst I think its now good that Microsoft now updates its browsers more often, its good to see that they have also introduced some good features.
I think the contextual menu is the best of the pick and can be quite useful.
Another good thing is that you can change to IE7 mode so that there is no need to run IE7 in a virtual machine or find a way of running IE8 side by side with IE7.
I still think for now I will continue to use Firefox and use IE8 as a test browser mostly.
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Simple URL encoding using PHP
Let me state that this type of encoding is not meant to hide some sensitive data or as a security measure but meant to avoid showing a
casual user the IDs being used in a query string so that the user does not try to navigate the site by simply changing parameters in a
query string.
If the user really wants to know what IDs are being used I am sure it wont take them long to figure out.
So say its an application passing the driverid(id1) and teamid(id2) in a query string and I don't want to show these in the query string a
simple way to achieve that in PHP is to use base 64 encoding.
I find it useful to choose a delimiter especially when they are more than one query string parameters in the originating page.
So say you have two parameters id1 and id2 in the form http://www.mysite.com/test2.php?id1=1234&id2=5678,
coming from test1.php page, you can use:
$id = base64_encode($id1.'~'.$id2);
with the tilde(~) acting as a delimiter.
This is then used in the form:
http://www.mysite.com/test2.php?id=$id
To retrieve back the query string parameters on test2.php you use:
$queryParams = explode('~', base64_decode($_GET['id']));
$id1 = $queryParams[0];
$id2 = $queryParams[1];
I think this is the basics of it but one can add a few extra steps for example reverse the string before displaying it using the PHP
strrev function, for example:
$id = base64_encode($id1.'~'.$id2);
$id = strrev($id);
and then on test2.php use:
$id = strrev(($_GET['id']));
$params = explode('~', base64_decode($id));
$id1 = $queryParams[0];
$id2 = $queryParams[1];
I am sure there are other ways to achieve the same thing but this one simple approach that I use sometimes.
