Nerd Talk

If you’re working on nginx configuration and you can’t start or reload it because you’re getting an error like this:

nginx: [emerg] unknown directive "if(-f" in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:67
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed

You need to make sure that the “if” and the “(” are separated with a space:

# will cause syntax error
if(-f $document_root/$uri.php) {
   rewrite ^(.*) $1.php last;
}
 
# this is correct
# notice the space between "if" and "("
if (-f $document_root/$uri.php) {
   rewrite ^(.*) $1.php last;
}

That should fix the issue and you should be able to start/reload nginx successfully.
As a programmer I tend to assume that “if(-f … )” will work because in essence it’s a valid syntax for if statements. For nginx, you should play by its rules because you’ll get a bunch of these errors if you don’t.

Nerd Talk

array_count_values function in PHP can only count integer and string values. At some point you may need to count occurrences of float values in an array but you can’t because array_count_values won’t let you. If you have an array like:

$digits = array(14.5, 5.42, 1.5, 8, 14.5);
$digits = array_count_values($digits);

This will give you a warning that says, Warning: array_count_values() [function.array-count-values]: Can only count STRING and INTEGER values!

There’s actually a hack to get around this and achieve counting occurrences of float values. All you need to do is cast all float values in the array as string. array_count_values can also count integers so why not just cast the values as int? You don’t want to do that because casting the float values as int will change the data type to int but also remove the decimal points in your values and make it a whole number. Take this as an example:

$float = 12.8;
var_dump($float);         // float(12.8) - original float value
var_dump((int)$float);    // int(12) - becomes whole number
var_dump(intval($float)); // int(12) - becomes whole number
var_dump((string)$float); // string(4) "12.8" - string type

Based on the example above we need to cast the float values as string. So in the case of the array that we want to count the values, we need to do something like:

$digits = array(14.5, 5.42, 1.5, 8, 14.5);
$newDigits = array();
foreach($digits as $key => $value)
	// cast float as string
	if(is_float($value))
		$newDigits[$key] = (string)$value;
	// for actual int and string values
	else
		$newDigits[$key] = $value;
 
$countValues = array_count_values($newDigits);
print_r($countValues);

The above code will cast all float values in the array as string and array_count_values will work as expected. The output will be:

Array
(
    [14.5] => 2
    [5.42] => 1
    [1.5] => 1
    [8] => 1
)

Hope that helps!

Nerd Talk

Food for thought, PHP automatically converts dots (‘.’) with underscores (‘_’) on GET or POST (or REQUEST) variables.

// sample url using GET: page.php?foo.bar=value
print_r($_GET);
 
// output:
// variable "foo.bar" becomes "foo_bar"
// array([foo_bar] => value)
echo $_GET['foo_bar']; // prints "value"