Musicals.net archive

Spent most of yesterday cobbling together a PHP script to archive the musicals.net Les Mis forum, as it appears they're going to upgrade their forum software soon and most of the old threads will get lost. I have never worked with PHP before (except a couple of pages on the Barricade Day site that were mostly yoinked from other people's code) and I think I liiiike it. It has the twin advantages of being very well-adapted for what it does--web programming--and oodles more forgiving than the languages I'm used to working in, i.e. Java and C. It almost feels too easy, like I'm writing in pseudocode or something. Or it did until I had to learn regular expressions on-the-fly and spent an hour swearing at the computer until I realized that (.*?) doesn't match newlines by default.

The code itself is ugly and kludge-y and specific to musicals.net, but it works, so now there is an archive of the forum on my site:

http://www.chanvrerie.net/mdn/

Musicals.net archive

Spent most of yesterday cobbling together a PHP script to archive the musicals.net Les Mis forum, as it appears they're going to upgrade their forum software soon and most of the old threads will get lost. I have never worked with PHP before (except a couple of pages on the Barricade Day site that were mostly yoinked from other people's code) and I think I liiiike it. It has the twin advantages of being very well-adapted for what it does--web programming--and oodles more forgiving than the languages I'm used to working in, i.e. Java and C. It almost feels too easy, like I'm writing in pseudocode or something. Or it did until I had to learn regular expressions on-the-fly and spent an hour swearing at the computer until I realized that (.*?) doesn't match newlines by default.

The code itself is ugly and kludge-y and specific to musicals.net, but it works, so now there is an archive of the forum on my site:

http://www.chanvrerie.net/mdn/