It is common to add a drop-down select box that is populated with USA states or Canadian provinces to PHP applications. There are basically three ways to do this. You can hard-code all of the Select box selections into your application, you can add the states to a MySQL database manually, or you can use the handy code on this page to create a States table in MySQL in just a few seconds.
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A shopping cart is an essential component of every e-commerce site. Although there are literally hundreds of shopping carts to choose from, only a few stand out. PHP is the preferred shopping cart language because it is the most popular web development language on the Internet. When combined with the MySQL database, PHP is unbeatable for cost effectiveness.
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This is a simple PHP script that takes data from a MySQL table and uses it to generate a drop-down select box for an HTML form. This can be used for a list of states on a credit card or user data form, or for a category selection or something where you need to pull the selections from a MySQL table. The script uses PHP to generate the HTML that is sent to the user’s browser.
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The ternary operator is a shortcut comparison operator that replaces an if-else statement in a PHP script. If you use a lot of comparison statements in your scripts, this can greatly reduce the number of lines of code. The ternary operator is really very simple to use, but it does tend to confuse newbie PHP programmers.
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Most new web developers have heard of SQL injection attacks, but not very many know that it is fairly easy to prevent an attacker from gaining access to your data by filtering out the vulnerabilities using MySQL extensions found in PHP. An SQL injection attack occurs when a hacker or cracker (a malicious hacker) attempts to dump the data in a database table in a database-driven web site. In an unprotected and vulnerable site, this is pretty easy to do.
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Banner ad rotators can range in complexity from simple systems that randomly display banner or sidebar ads, to very complex systems that track every click on each ad and display different ads based upon preset percentages for each ad display. This snippet of PHP code is the simple version. As many ads as you want can be loaded into an array and the code will randomly select an ad to display every time the page is loaded.
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