RE: [PHP] 'Code Snippets' you couldn't live without

[snip]Extending PHP to have "shorthand" functions? Was that irony?[/snip] It most certainly was irony, Klaus. I was merely trying to illustrate the point that writing a custom function which does EXACTLY the same thing as a built in function is redundant. A number of functions within php do have aliases (sizeof() is an alias count() for example) but these are throwbacks to equitable functions in other languages. As I stated earlier, if your function does more than the built in function, then yes, you are increasing efficiency, but if all you're doing is creating a custom alias of which only you will know the useage, then you only increase obscurity. As for my favorite piece of reusable code, I hate preparing dates for insertion into a database when I have to deal with null values, etc. So I use a function which takes an array of date field names and a regular expression, then validates $_POST['field name'] against the regular expression and returns an array, $dates, each field of which contains either a date prepared for insertion (wrapped in single quotes) or simply the string 'null'. function _formatPostDates($dateArr,$regex) { $dates = array(); foreach ($dateArr as $date) { $dates[$date] = preg_match($regex,$_POST[$date]) ? "'{$_POST['release']}'" : "null"; } return $dates; } On a page where I have to deal with multiple date fields, this greatly increases the efficiency of validating the dates and makes things safer and easier when creating queries. Cheers, Pablo