Introduction

As with many other programming languages PHP has dozens upon dozens of functions that most developers simply will never use. There are many reasons why these functions may not be used. They may be too advanced, may be under-documented, may have hard to understand names or calling conventions, etc.

I've spent some time over on the PHP web site searching for functions that are extremely useful but underused by the majority of PHP developers. Today we're going to look at 10 of these functions. For the typical PHP programmer, many of these functions will be new and may even open up a completely new part of PHP that you never even knew existed!

For advanced developers, many of these functions will simply provide an easier way of accomplishing a specific programmatic task. For example, instead of looping through a binary file to write its contents to the browser, you can use the fpassthru() function to do this for you automatically.

Anyway, let's get on with the show and look at functions 1 to 5...

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