Web development can be stressful enough as it is. Deadlines to meet, clients requesting constant changes, your code works differently throughout multiple browsers. No matter the source of your problems, a few tools can change everything. Sometimes it can all be a little overwhelming which is why us developers need to make the most out of the tools we’re given. Whether you specialize in PHP, ASP, or python, I’d like to go over a few basic online tools that can make our jobs a heck of a lot easier.
Online Functions
This is probably my favorite website on the entire list. A few weeks ago I was looking in a MySQL database and some of the data I needed to read was serialized using PHP. Rather than making a script to unserialize it, or trying to read through the jumbled text, I found a great website that could make sense of this mess. Online Functions is a website that has some of PHP’s most common functions on an easy to use web interface. I was able to paste in my serialized text and with the click of a button it was transformed into something readable. That’s not all they do, you can create base64, md5, JSON, and pretty much all useful PHP functions. I love this site because it has everything you could possibly want, from math to time, to even regular expressions.
Online JSON Decoder
Again, I found this website very recently because some data I was scraping from ESPN was in JSON format. There are quite a few of these sites scattered throughout the web, but this one easily has the best interface. It’s true that even the above website I listed has a JSON decoding feature, but here’s why this website gets its own mention. This site which is built in Javascript has collapsible menus for each hierarchical level of the JSON. The absolute best part is you can even add new items such as arrays, strings, and objects. This and the fact that it has syntax highlighting sets this website above any of its competitors.
Regex Generator
Every programmer knows that regular expressions can be exhausting. Complicated expressions can start to look like another language, and indeed they are. This site is a classic and has been helping me for years. This tool allows you to type in a string of text and simply click the aspects you want to be extracted using Regex. It also gives you a series of languages which you can generate code for to use in your script. No more reading the manual and forming complicated expressions in your head.