Well, I suppose Cameron is something of a parody of a Prime Minister anyway, so why not?

PHP has strtoupper(), strtolower() and ucasewords() functions, but none of these does just what I needed. Googling found a few attempts to solve the same problem, and I’ve probably pinched bits of code from various places. If I’ve pinched some of yours, let me know and I’ll acknowledge your contribution. Hence the function below.

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<?php
 
function address_tidy($text) {
	$text = trim($text);
	$text = str_replace('\r', '', $text);
	$text = str_replace('\n', '', $text);
	$words = explode(' ', $text);
	foreach ($words as $word) {
		$word = ucfirst(strtolower($word));
		//Specials like Mac, Mc etc
		$specials = array('Mac', 'Mc', 'O\'');
		foreach ($specials as $special) {
			$pos = stripos($word, $special);
			if (($pos !== false) && ($pos == 0)) {
				$parts = explode($special, $word);
				$word = $special . ucfirst($parts[1]);
			}
		}
		//...but not for some words that begin with 'Mac' 
		// (make your own mind up about Macintosh, Maclure & Maclaren)
		$specials = array('macken', 'macclesfield', 'machynlleth');
		if (in_array(strtolower($word), $specials)) {
			$word = ucfirst(strtolower($word));
		}
		//Let's go lower case on some words
		$specials = array('de', 'la', 'le', 'on', 'of', 'and', 'under', 'upon');
		if (in_array(strtolower($word), $specials)) {
			$word = strtolower($word);
		}
	}
	return implode(' ', $words);
}
 
?>

Here’s a quick run-down of what it does when you feed it a string…

Lines 4, 5 & 6 just strip white-space from either end of the string and remove any line breaks and newlines.

Line 7 breaks the string into words on space characters and the loop from line 8 to line 18 deals with each word, one at a time.

Line 9 does most of the work, converting the word first to lower case and then capitalising it, which is great for the vast majority of words, but what about Scottish and Irish names?

That’s what lines 11-17 deal with. Essentially, presented with a list of prefixes declared as $specials at line 11 (which you can add to if needed), we then find any words that begin with those prefixes and capitalise the fragment of word following. Example – the word being processed arrives at line 12 as ‘Macdonald’, and the code goes through each of the ‘specials’ to see if our word starts with the prefix. It does in the case of ‘Mac’, so we capitalise ‘donald’ and put the two fragments back together as ‘MacDonald’.

But that messes up ‘Macclesfield’, making it ‘MacClesfield’, so lines 21-24 undo what we just did for another list of ‘specials’, which you can also add to if you wish.

Lines 26-29 just make some shorter words (are they conjunctions?) into lower case, so you and up with ‘Walton le Dale’ or ‘Stratford upon Avon’.

Then we put the text back together and return it at line 31. Easy.

Help yourself if you find this function useful. Any links back or other acknowledgements would be more than welcome, but aren’t necessary.

Leave a comment if you find any bugs, or you think you can improve my code.

It is called ProcessWire, and it is unusual because it has no front end. (The download comes with an example front end, but there is no requirement to use it.) So we PHP and CSS dabblers can have a field day! All the ProcessWire CMS (or content management framework) does is look after the back end organisation of fields into pages and pages into a hierarchy. It does a great deal more than that but click the link and read more there.

Every time I use ProcessWire I find new delights, whether in the way it makes data available for front end display or in the control it gives of data in the back end, and the community, though quite small, is knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. I could go on at great length, but get over there and find out for yourself!

We are developing a web project at work that I can’t talk about yet, but the boss wanted to email a link and login details (the site is protected by Apache’s Basic Authentication, you know, where a username and password box comes up before you can access a site or directory) to a potential partner. And we wanted to be able to check if they had used the information and visited the site.

Well, after much unsuccessful Googling, I noticed that the logged-in username is right there in the raw access log, just after the IP address of the visitor. So all I needed to do was create a new username/password pair just for them and we can see if they drop by.

The icon is to indicate that somewhere is open all year, and the file size? 365 bytes, naturally.

It’s obviously old, and looks to be of the laying of some tram tracks, but Chorley never had trams, so it isn’t here. Any ideas?

(This is also an experiment with another post type, but the question above still stands.)

(And this is also a chance to experiment with different post formats!)