Razvan Pandor

Recently I had to save a DataBase from a server only with FTP access and without any tool like PhpMyAdmin or Cpanel. I had only the FTP credentials, the name of the DataBase and the credentials to access the DataBase.

So if you want to save a database to a file only with the aid of PHP here’s a small function that does the trick:

 function backup_tables($host,$user,$pass,$name,$tables = '*')
{
	$link = mysql_connect($host,$user,$pass);
	mysql_select_db($name,$link);
    	//get all of the tables - if the tables parameter is "*" all the tables will be taken
	if($tables == '*')
	{
		$tables = array();
		$result = mysql_query('SHOW TABLES');
		while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
		{
			$tables[] = $row[0];
		}
	}
	else
	{
                 //$tables should be a string of table names separated by coma
		$tables = is_array($tables) ? $tables : explode(',',$tables);
	}

	//cycle through the tables  and build the text to be written into the dump file
	foreach($tables as $table)
	{
		$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM '.$table);
		$num_fields = mysql_num_fields($result);

		$return.= 'DROP TABLE '.$table.';';
		$row2 = mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query('SHOW CREATE TABLE '.$table));
		$return.= "\n\n".$row2[1].";\n\n";

		for ($i = 0; $i < $num_fields; $i++)
		{
			while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))
			{
				$return.= 'INSERT INTO '.$table.' VALUES(';
				for($j=0; $j<$num_fields; $j++)
				{
					$row[$j] = addslashes($row[$j]);
					$row[$j] = ereg_replace("\n","\\n",$row[$j]);
					if (isset($row[$j])) { $return.= '"'.$row[$j].'"' ; } else { $return.= '""'; }
					if ($j<($num_fields-1)) { $return.= ','; }
				}
				$return.= ");\n";
			}
		}
		$return.="\n\n\n";
	}

	//save the dump file
	$handle = fopen('db-backup.sql','w+');
	fwrite($handle,$return);
	fclose($handle);
}

function replace_repeated_spaces($string)
{
	// tabs, new lines and carriages are also replaced
$string = ereg_replace("[ \t\n\r]+", " ", $string);
return $string;
}

$string = "This
   is
a   dummy
text. ";
$new_string = replace_repeated_spaces($string);
// Outputs: This is a dummy text

ereg_replace is almost deprecated from PHP, better to use preg_replace instead. And even when you will change to preg_replace this code will be 5 times slower than
while (strpos(‘ ‘, $string) !== false) $string = str_replace(‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, $string);
So the main idea is: “When you can write your code in a couple of lines without regular expressions – do it.”

Tough this is quite simple i did not remember how to do it today. Stumbled at the “[ ]” in the element name.
The HTML part:

one
two
three
four
five

and the PHP :