SELECT * INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/file/extract.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
FROM `users`
WHERE first_name='John';

This works a treat and will generate a nicely formatted file for you which you can open in Excel for example. In PostgreSQL I am currently doing:

SELECT * FROM "users" WHERE first_name='John' \o /path/to/file/extract.csv

This generates the file:

 first_name | last_name
------------+-----------
 John       | Smith
 John       | Brown


Lots of spaces and pipes for all! I then open this file in Komodo and “convert” it using regular expressions. For example the regex below would be used:

All instances of "\s+\|\s+" would be converted to ","

I don’t recommend doing this because if you have 1000s of records the processing time is immense even on my iMac with 4Gb RAM.

One solution I have found suggests using the “\a” command, prior to running your query. This stops the output from aligning thus removing the problem of all the unnecessary white space characters.

I notice Jumping Bean is offering a solution as well which I will try out next week.

I could have created the template error404.ctp under /views/errors/ and written any URL parsing functionality there but coding any PHP logic in a HTML template is not recommended in the MVC framework paradigm. It is worth noting that CakePHP allows you to create the following error templates under /views/errors/ that are great if you just want custom error pages without the need for any PHP code:
error404.ctp
missing_action.ctp
missing_component_class.ctp
missing_component_file.ctp
missing_connection.ctp
missing_controller.ctp
missing_helper_class.ctp
missing_helper_file.ctp
missing_layout.ctp
missing_model.ctp
missing_scaffolddb.ctp
missing_table.ctp
missing_view.ctp
private_action.ctp
scaffold_error.ctp


As I did have a requirement to write some PHP code I created the file app_error.php under the root directory:
class AppError extends ErrorHandler {
public function error404($arg) {// If someone arrives here - let's try and keep the tracking codes$url = $arg['url'];$url_string = "";// ...$this->controller->redirect("/pages/mainpage/" . $url_string);exit();}}

As you can see, you just need to create a function named the same as the error. In this example I am not using the error404.ctp template after processing, instead redirecting to another static page with the tracking codes appended to the end of the URL.

As well as addressing the sub-query issue to speed up queries I have been looking into regular expressions in PostgreSQL. RegEx can be extremely powerful when used correctly. A request I receive frequently is to pull all customers out of a database based on their postcode. I started out doing:
SELECT email FROM contact WHERE postcode IN ('L1', 'L2', 'L3');
This works fine if the number of postcodes is small but what happens if you need everyone in the ranges L1-L99 and M1-M60 and CH1-CH56. As this query structure no longer becomes a viable solution I use RegEx. To retrieve all people in these postcode ranges you could do something like:
SELECT email FROM contact WHERE postcode ~* '^(L|M|CH)\\d{1,2}'
A much smaller query. Notice the use of ‘\\d’ – if you only use ‘\d’ rather than matching against a digit it will match against the letter d.

Or how about returning all customers that have a french email address:
SELECT email FROM contact WHERE email ~* '.*\.fr$'

Note: this doesn’t check if the email address is valid – only if it ends in .fr. Also you need to use the tilde operator (~) rather than an equals sign. The asterisk (*) is used when you want a case-insensitive search.

So to put both a left outer join the regular expression to the test:
SELECT contact.email FROM contact LEFT OUTER JOIN suppression
ON contact.id = suppression.contact_id
WHERE contact.postcode ~* '^(L|M|CH)\\d{1,2}'
AND suppression.contact_id IS NULL
This will return email addresses of customers whose postcodes are in the desired range and are not suppressed.

This week I started using Cake for a fairly ambitious project – a pan European multi-lingual website for Honda. The site isn’t particularly complex in nature but it is a project in which I can test and utilise lots of the in-built functionality in Cake. Essentially the site will be powered by XML and each country will have its own XML file containing country-specific content. The correct XML document will be pulled in based on a valid country/language code being supplied in the URL string. This is how I accomplished getting custom country-specific URLs working in Cake:

The URL structure I want is
http://www.mydomain.com/en_GB/pages/home
where en_GB is the language/country code.

Firstly I set a variable in the config.php file called language:
Configure::write('language', 'en_GB');
This sets the default language of the site to be English (Great Britain) so in the event of an invalid or unsupplied country code it would default back to to this.

I then modified the routes.php file:
Router::connect('/:language/:controller/:action/*', array(), array());
This uses the language variable I defined above.

Finally in my AppController class I check using the beforeFilter function that the supplied language is valid and then update the config if it is, i.e.: Configure::write(’language’, ‘fr_FR’); The visitor’s preference is then stored in a cookie.

For first time visitors the language is set using a country lookup on IP address service.

I love Google; I use pretty much all their products, attended Google Developer Day in London last year and admire their contributions to open source software. Like the vast majority of people I use google.com everyday for search and couldn’t live without it. However I also love choice so I hope Microsoft make a real alternative – currently we have Yahoo and Live and both are inferior to Google for various reasons.

At the very least if Microsoft only make a small slash in the market it should encourage Google to innovate even more and incorporate any of the good features Microsoft bring to the table.

To see a video of Bing in action click here.

Java was in fact my main language at university and when given an interesting task to tackle developing with it was enjoyable. However when I left university and decided it was web development I wanted to pursue a career in Java fell by the wayside and I adopted PHP as my main language. I had been using PHP in my spare time for website builds but now decided I wanted to use it in a professional environment.

I picked up Professional Apache Tomcat 6 » about a week ago and have been reading through it. I’ve now installed Tomcat  on a local development (LAMP) box and everything seems to be working: my PHP sites are working as normal and I have configured mod_proxy to forward all Java sites onto Tomcat for processing. Installing Java and Tomcat was extremely easy but settting up mod_proxy and the Tomcat-Apache connectors was fiddly and very annoying.

It was worth playing around with until I got the exact setup I wanted as now I will be able to add Tomcat to our LAMP boxes at work very quickly. So onto actual development – my experience in using Java for website builds is quite limited so I think the next thing on my to-buy list is Murach’s Java Servlets and JSP: 2nd Edition ».

In the end this didn’t turn out to be a problem because the “Develop” menu provided takes care of most of my needs. I found you can switch this develop menu on by opening up a terminal window and typing:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1.

As well as providing a web inspector which allows you to inspect individual elements on the page, you can also disable images, styles and JavaScript in much the same way you can in the web developer toolbar in Firefox.

In general I have liked using Safari: pages render fast and I like the new “Top sites” page that greets you when you open a new tab:

Google did this with Chrome but it has been implemented better by Apple. All in all I have enjoyed using Safari and it is definitely a contender to replace Firefox as my main browser.

I don’t use a PC that much anymore but wanted to give Internet Explorer 8 a go; one because I will have to make sure sites I develop in future work in it and two because I was intrigued. I hate Internet Explorer 6 with a passion and don’t think much of the seventh version either but I tried to forget about that and go in with an open mind. After playing around with it for about half a day I am happy to report I think it is a huge step in the right direction and I have enjoyed using it. The Accelerators which are like add-ons take a piece of content on a page and allow you to mail it using Gmail, or add it to Delicious, or map it using Google Maps etc. They work very well and are a great addition.

I tested some of the sites I have developed in the past and they all seem to work fine which is a relief as I tried the Beta 1 version ages ago and some of them rendered terribly. Microsoft have also added a compatibility option so you can choose to render the sites using the IE7 engine, the IE8 engine or the IE8 compatibility engine. If and when I start using a PC again (hurry up Windows 7) I would have no problem using Internet Explorer (something I haven’t said in years). Let’s hope the security is as good as they say it is and over the next few weeks there aren’t lots of news stories detailing various holes hackers have found.

These problems have made Google’s Android more appealing by the day. Android still has a long way to go, and at present there are no handsets using it that I like, but the fact it is open source and has Google’s backing means as time goes on more people will begin to embrace the platform and develop apps for it. The future looks bright but currently the lack of iTunes and Exchange synchronisation still make this a no-goer for me.

So it was with interest I read about Windows Mobile 6.5 earlier this week. I have had one Smart Phone running Windows Mobile before and it was awful. This latest version does show some promise though:

I like the look of the UI, it seems very intuitive to use. The menus look great, the effects and transitions seem smooth and the loading of images fast. It also has in-built Flash support. This is a must for me and is sorely missing on the iPhone, it is almost unforgivable.

Although it all seems good I still don’t think I could use IE as my browser of choice!

SICAMS (Simple Integrated Campaign Management System) is a bespoke to Honda car dealers system that enables dealerships to manage their own professional email marketing campaigns with ease. With SICAMS they can send a variety of dealer personalised HTML emails that provide current information and/or offers on cars across the Honda range to either individual customers or a list of relevant customers from their database.

After 4 months of development we are delighted with the end result. Some nice screenshots of it in action:

The best thing about cable is you get what you pay for: when I was on ADSL I would pay for a 2Mb connection and get 512Kb. The reasons ISPs give for this common problem are varied but usually they end up saying “you live too far away from the exchange”. Whenever I attempted any serious dialogue as to why I wasn’t receiving what I was paying for with my ISP (I won’t name them) they always rolled out that familiar mantra. That, the terrible usage allowance and a peak hours time frame spanning from 9am to 10pm left me constantly annoyed. I found the service patchy and unreliable and wouldn’t want to go back.

I must say not all ADSL providers are bad and there are many good ones out there and if you live close to a telephone exchange you’ll probably get great speeds. As Virgin use a fibre optic cable you don’t suffer from this issue as the line won’t be affected by noise and local interference.