Category Archives: Libraries

As part of the work for Filing Reminders, I needed to fetch company data (specifically filing dates) from data.companieshouse.gov.uk. In order to do this, I wrote a small wrapper class which normalises company numbers (e.g. 123456 becomes 00123456, as numbers … Continue reading →

If you run a UK website which collects any sort of address information, you will no doubt have come across the potentially thorny subject of postcodes. Specifically, you will want to perform the two basic checks required for most user … Continue reading →

Over the weekend I released the first version of flickr Lookup, a PHP library for accessing flickr via its API. It’s a simple wrapper which turns API requests into PHP functions which return an array of data, hiding the repetitive … Continue reading →

I’ve just released the first version of MaPit Lookup, a PHP library for MaPit, the mapping information service from the chaps at mySociety. It’s a simple wrapper which turns MaPit requests into PHP functions which return an array of data, … Continue reading →

Ever wanted to fiddle about with Linked Data using RDF and SPARQL? If so, LiteraryMachine has an excellent post entitled Dead Simple: RDF and SPARQL using PHP, which explains how to do exactly that.

If you’ve ever needed to automatically read or generate Excel spreadsheets in PHP, there’s a fantastic library called PHPExcel which will help you with these tasks. It supports Excel 2007 files, is free software (LGPL) and doesn’t require too much … Continue reading →