The other day we were programming a new website feature for a client that required the use of URL encode and URL decode functions.
We realized that our uber-cool web tools site didn’t have any web based URL encode or decode functions, which would have been handy during our testing. So, we’ve added them to our web based tools site for the next time we need them.
Here are the links to the new tools:
Sigh. We discovered a bug in our recently reworked tools.perceptus.ca (“PWT”) site.
We have a simple, custom, partial MVC system that runs a few of our smaller websites. That system uses the PEAR HTML_Template_IT package to do the final template rendering. We ported PWT to our MVC to make future site changes much easier.
A week after going live with the changes, we found a baffling bug. The tools were eating the dollar sign and dollar amounts (but not the decimals) from the input text. E.g. “$103.00″ would get returned as “.00″. Not good.
Apparently, HTML_Template_IT defaults to processing all text with regex. Not cool.
There might be a historical reason for this, but for new users, this has got to be confusing. Plus, this is NOT mentioned in the intro documentation: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.html.html-template-it.intro.php
We’re not the only ones caught by this: http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=50.
The fix is to initialize and set the use_preg option, like this:
$tpl = new HTML_Template_IT(‘./’,array(‘use_preg’=>true));
I have glanced at the package pages, and while this behavior is documented it is buried quite deeply in the documentation.
This also explains a typo we had years ago on a static page that had the text like $5 in it. That time, we just changed the copy to read 5 dollars and got on with life.
We have Perceptus’ Web Tools at the top of mind lately. We’ve created another new tool, our minimal web based adding machine.
Have you ever had a half-hazardly formatted list of numbers to add up (maybe from an email?) and you didn’t want to do this:
Well, we have, and now we have created a tool to save us, and hopefully you, some time.
Visit our new web based adding machine tool and try pasting in a set of numbers like this:
10
-7.8
8 000
(92)
30.1
And be impressed when you get results like this:
Add Running Total+0 0+10 10-7.8 2.2+8000 8002.2-92 7910.2+30.1 7940.3
Impressed? Did you notice that it handles negative numbers in (brackets) magically? Or how about that awkward space in “8 000″? We’re pretty proud of ourselves – even if you’re not impressed.
Comments and feedback is always appreciated!
A few times a year, a client of our will need our help in cleaning up a manually populated Excel file that has a couple of date columns. Invariably, there is a hodge-podge of date entries, such as 2010-10-05; june 10, 2010; or 8/4/2008. We’ve finally made a tool to fix up the bulk of this so that Excel will detect it properly as a date value.
Perceptus introduces the The Clean and convert a column of dates in Excel Numbers Wizard, on the Perceptus Web Tools mini-site.
We hope this tool saves some people besides ourselves some time.
We added a couple new tools to Web Tools by Perceptus today. We also cleaned up the look of the site a little – it’s gone all the way from ugly to almost passable. Similar to our blog, over time, the trickle of traffic to our web based text mangling site has grown, and it had earned a bit of our effort to tidy it up. Who knows, if this keeps up, we’ll have to keep adding more tools!
The new tools?
Like the rest of the site, the clipboard is your friend. Run one tool. Copy the result to the clipboard, and run another one of our tools on the result.