Vidax.net – The blog

I recently came to a situation where I had to check 1800 links validity. No chance to do it manually. I decided to write some PHP code to check these URLs using the PHP get_headers function. Checking an URL seems easy but it takes a tiny amount of time to process because it calls distant resources: DNS lookup, connection time, download time… for each request. Using a simple « while » PHP function, you may come across three issues:

1. it may be very long to complete and it’s not always possible to increase the PHP maximum execution time
2. the display: your web page will be blank for quite a long time until enough data is processed. Of course you may play with the buffer handler but still!
3. the process: as PHP is not a multi-threaded language out of the box, it will check one link by one. Much longer…

Therefore, I developed a very simple peace of code to solve these issues. As it is working quite softly, I decided to share it with you.
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[EDIT 2013-01-14] the following code has been modified. There was a bug that would prevent some very particular attachments to be saved. Thanks to Byron for alerting me. Also attachments are now exported into a directory.

I’ve been busy working on a piece of code whose role is to extract all attachments from emails using PHP and IMAP. It is not really simple so here’s a recursive function doing that work:

<?php

// SETTINGS
$server		= '{imap.vidax.net:993/imap/ssl}INBOX';
$username	= 'test@vidax.net';
$password	= 'test';
$export_dir	= '/home/axel/test/'; # final slash is required
// END SETTINGS

$mbox = imap_open($server, $username, $password) or die('Unable to login');

// Getting all emails
if ($headers = imap_headers($mbox)) {
	$i = 0;
	foreach ($headers as $val) {
		$i ++;

		// Will return many infos about current email
		// Use var_dump($info) to check content
		$info	= imap_headerinfo($mbox, $i);
		$msgid	= trim($info->Msgno);

		// Gets the current email structure (including parts)
		// Use var_dump($structure) to check it out
		$structure = imap_fetchstructure($mbox, $msgid);

		// Getting attachments
		// Will return an array with all included files
		// Also works with inline attachments
		$attachments = get_attachments($structure);

		// You are now able to get attachments' raw content
		foreach ($attachments as $k => $at) {
			$filename = $export_dir.'id_'.$msgid.'_part_'.str_replace('.', '-', $at['part']).'_'.$at['filename'];
			$content = imap_fetchbody($mbox, $msgid, $at['part']);

			if ($content !== false && strlen($content) > 0 && $content != '') {
				switch ($at['encoding']) {
					case '3':
						$content = base64_decode($content);
					break;

					case '4':
						$content = quoted_printable_decode($content);
					break;
				}

				file_put_contents($filename, $content);
			}
		}
	}
}
// Shutting down
imap_close($mbox);

/**
* Gets all attachments
* Including inline images or such
* @author: Axel de Vignon
* @param $content: the email structure
* @param $part: not to be set, used for recursivity
* @return array(type, encoding, part, filename)
*
*/
function get_attachments($content, $part = null, $skip_parts = false) {
	static $results;

	// First round, emptying results
	if (is_null($part)) {
		$results = array();
	}
	else {
		// Removing first dot (.)
		if (substr($part, 0, 1) == '.') {
			$part = substr($part, 1);
		}
	}

	// Saving the current part
	$actualpart = $part;
	// Split on the "."
	$split = explode('.', $actualpart);

	// Skipping parts
	if (is_array($skip_parts)) {
		foreach ($skip_parts as $p) {
			// Removing a row off the array
			array_splice($split, $p, 1);
		}
		// Rebuilding part string
		$actualpart = implode('.', $split);
	}

	// Each time we get the RFC822 subtype, we skip
	// this part.
	if (strtolower($content->subtype) == 'rfc822') {
		// Never used before, initializing
		if (!is_array($skip_parts)) {
			$skip_parts = array();
		}
		// Adding this part into the skip list
		array_push($skip_parts, count($split));
	}

	// Checking ifdparameters
	if (isset($content->ifdparameters) && $content->ifdparameters == 1 && isset($content->dparameters) && is_array($content->dparameters)) {
		foreach ($content->dparameters as $object) {
			if (isset($object->attribute) && preg_match('~filename~i', $object->attribute)) {
				$results[] = array(
				'type'          => (isset($content->subtype)) ? $content->subtype : '',
				'encoding'      => $content->encoding,
				'part'          => empty($actualpart) ? 1 : $actualpart,
				'filename'      => $object->value
				);
			}
		}
	}

	// Checking ifparameters
	else if (isset($content->ifparameters) && $content->ifparameters == 1 && isset($content->parameters) && is_array($content->parameters)) {
		foreach ($content->parameters as $object) {
			if (isset($object->attribute) && preg_match('~name~i', $object->attribute)) {
				$results[] = array(
				'type'          => (isset($content->subtype)) ? $content->subtype : '',
				'encoding'      => $content->encoding,
				'part'          => empty($actualpart) ? 1 : $actualpart,
				'filename'      => $object->value
				);
			}
		}
	}

	// Recursivity
	if (isset($content->parts) && count($content->parts) > 0) {
		// Other parts into content
		foreach ($content->parts as $key => $parts) {
			get_attachments($parts, ($part.'.'.($key + 1)), $skip_parts);
		}
	}
	return $results;
}

Bonus tip: you may display images using their raw content data. For instance, the following HTML code will display a red dot:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUA
AAAFCAYAAACNbyblAAAAHElEQVQI12P4//8/w38GIAXDIBKE0DHxgljNBAAO
9TXL0Y4OHwAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==" alt="Red dot">

The result:

On the 25th of february 2010, I wrote a post explaining how to handle domain aliases with Postfix (http://vidax.net/blog/2010/02/domain-aliases-with-postfix/). I recently decided to add dynamic addresses support. Google uses this convenient feature. Let’s say your address is « james@domain.com ».  Using the dynamic addresses, you will be able to route « james+anything@domain.com » to your real address.

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Travaillant intensément avec Subversion, j’utilise plusieurs branches pour gérer mes sites de développement et mes sites de production. Je passe donc chaque fonctionnalité d’une branche à l’autre pour les passer en PROD, ce qui correspond à un « merge » SVN.

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Depuis un jour ou deux, une extension pour Firefox fait trembler les géants tels que Facebook, Google ou Twitter. Cette extension baptisée FireSheep et s’installant en deux clics de souris, permet de voler les sessions sur une vingtaines de sites Internet connus. S’ajoutent à ceux cités précédemment Tumblr, Yahoo, Amazon, Basecamp, Dropbox, Flickr et j’en passe.

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Following my previous post, I decided to write a Perl script that will be executed on post-commit. Initially I had a Shell script to update automatically my development Apache document root every 3 min. Therefore each commit I make was visible within 3 minutes on my development site.

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