PHP Website Function Lookup

8th January 2008 - 3 minutes read time

Those of you who have coded in PHP must have looked at the PHP website at some point, even if it was just to down load the latest version, or to look up a function reference.

What most people don't realise is that there is a really easy way to go straight to the page that you want without having to mess around with the tetchy search engine on the PHP site.

Lets say you wanted to know about the function phpinfo(). This is a debugging function that displays everything you could possible imagine about the PHP environment and is usually used by people who are just starting out with the language as it prints a lot of stuff to the screen.

To look at the reference for the phpinfo() function you could go to the following URL.

http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php

However, if you just type in www.php.net and the name of the function it will take you to the correct page. So for the phpinfo() function we would type the following.

www.php.net/phpinfo

The shorter URL takes us to the same page and is much easier to type in or bookmark.

This works with any function or language construct, and even if you type in a function that isn't there you will just be presented with a search results page so the site will always try to get you the content you are looking for.

PHP

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