How to Create a Windows Keyboard Shortcut

Recently I have needed to convert web pages saved in non-UTF-8 encoding into UTF-8 encoding. I was using Windows Notepad to open files and then save them with the same file name (using the Save As command) but selected “UTF-8” in the encoding field (It defaults to ANSI). I noticed, however, that I needed to close Notepad and reopen it every time I wanted to do this, otherwise weird characters would appear when I try to view the converted file. So, instead of looking for and clicking on the Notepad icon for each file, I created a keyboard shortcut key to do this.  This works for any program. Here’s how:

1. Go to Windows Notepad and right click and select “Properties” as shown below.

windows shortcut Continue reading How to Create a Windows Keyboard Shortcut

Find Out a File’s Encoding On Windows

Recently, I needed to know whether a file was encoded in UTF-8 or not. Since everything is international nowadays (especially websites), you might as well encode everything in UTF-8 so no funky characters appear. Although there are many encoding schemes, Notepad was pretty easy to use to see whether a text file was encoded in UTF-8 or not. Here’s what I did:

  1. Open a text file (e.g. index.php),
  2. Click File -> Save As
  3. Look as what is selected in the Encoding field. If it’s not UTF-8, then it’s not UTF-8, and you can select UTF-8 and save it as UTF-8.
If anyone finds a simple way to automate this in a loop to convert a batch of files, let me know in the comments. I read many posts on automating this in PHP.net comments but they didn’t seem reliable.
Actually, I just found out you can use the free Notepad ++ to convert from ANSI to UTF-8 and to other character encodings.

URL Regular Expression (Regex)

Here’s a regular expression to match URLs based on the RFC 3986. This example uses PHP.

[cc lang=”php”]
$scheme = “(https?)://”;
$userinfo = ‘([“+a-z0-9-._~+”]+(:[“+a-z0-9-._~+”]+)?@)?’;
$host = ‘([([0-9a-f]{1,4}|:)(:[0-9a-f]{0,4}){1,7}((d{1,3}.){3}d{1,3})?]|[“+a-z0-9-+”]+(.[“+a-z0-9-+”]+)*)’;
$port = “(:d{1,5})?”;
$path = ‘(/(([“+a-z0-9-._~!$&’ . “‘()*+,;=:@+” . ‘]|”+%[0-9a-f]{2}+”)+)?)*’;
$query = ‘(?(([“+a-z0-9-._~!$&’ . “‘()*+,;=:@+” . ‘”/”+”?”+”]|”+%[0-9a-f]{2}+”)+)?)?’;
$fragment = ‘(#(([“+a-z0-9-._~!$&’ . “‘()*+,;=:@+” . ‘”/”+”?”+”]|”+%[0-9a-f]{2}+”)+)?)?’;
[/cc] Continue reading URL Regular Expression (Regex)

Different Types of CAPTCHA

Recently I needed to improve CAPTCHA on a website. Here are the different types of CAPTCHAs I found.

Personally, the CSS CAPTCHA is the most elegant since users won’t even see any CAPTCHA field.
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