In this article I will provide some background to character sets and character encodings. The focus is on what is needed to work with XML parsers, as a preliminary to further articles in the series. For this reason there are some areas (glyphs and representation for example) that have not been covered.

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SnipSrv is a small PHP script to extract a piece of text from a file (which I assume is a quote, but could be anything) and return it. You’ll find it on its own page here.

Introduction

Any modern day Web programmer has to master a whole range of languages and protocols, from client side scripting through to server side Apache modules. And now, here is PHP, one of the fastest growing server side scripting languages around and you need to add it to your current arsenal of Perl, Python, ASP, JSP, Javascript, Java…

In this article, I’ll point out some of the main areas where things are different from other languages (particularly Perl, Javascript and VB/ASP) to help you get started. After all, programming is programming whatever the language, and most of what you already know can be reused in PHP. Just watch out for those little details!

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The World Wide Web is a global network of computers, most of them running some form of HTTP (Web) servers. A Web server is a very simple animal, when asked for a web page, it looks for the page and, if it can find it, returns it to the browser. What makes Web servers interesting is when we can ask the server to process the page before returning it. This is the job of server side scripting modules, of which there is wide choice, such as PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP and Perl CGI. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses and there are situations where one is to be preferred over another.

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