Hinnerk Altenburg

This WordPress filter hooks into WP_Http::_dispatch_request() to write all request and response details into a logfile.
It logs all HTTP requests (GET, POST, HEAD) that are sent and received by the WP_Http class, e.g. explicitly via $wp_http_object->request() or via wp_remote_request() or wp_remote_get() or wp_remote_post() or wp_remote_head().
The hook is useful for logging while debugging WordPress plugins that connect to other servers.

See also:
WordPress Plugin API Documentation: Filters
WordPress Function Reference: add_filter

Having the error message “Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal)” in my log files, I tried to handle this properly without letting the process die nor throwing away the whole string.
Having some research on Google I came up with following solution:

See also:
http://perldoc.perl.org/Encode.html#Handling-Malformed-Data
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=839519

This is how you can dynamically set a custom HTTP User-Agent for your Perl requests to fake a device or browser for testing purpose or getting a device-specific version of a website.
WWW::Mechanize supports setting a custom user-agent with the constructor and after this gives a choice of 6 pre-defined basic user-agents ( $mech->agent_alias() ), only.

The following code demonstrates how to dynamically change the user-agent on a Mechanize object.

The Perl regular expression (regexp/regex) equivalent to PHP’s strip_tags() is:

while ($string =~ s/<\S[^<>]*(?:>|$)//gs) {};

Please note that it also denotes an opening “<” (followed by a non-whitespace character) as a tag and strips all characters behind, even it is not closed by a “>”. This is the same behavior as PHP’s strip_tags().

Update: This regexp is only satisfying my test against PHP 4.x, but 5.x is pretty smarter when it comes to edge cases. It will be a challenge to build a Perl equivalent as all the different approaches in CPAN also fail the test.

Update 2010-07-07: I’m currently porting strip_tags() from the C source code of PHP 5.3.2 to a CPAN Module. Stay tuned.

Update 2011-05-25: Today I finally uploaded my Perl port to CPAN: http://search.cpan.org/~hinnerk/HTML-StripTags-1.00/
New home of this module is http://www.hinnerk-altenburg.de/perl-strip_tags/

Today, we at epublica have officially released my work of the last months – a Perl port of PHPIDS, a tool for detection of Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site-Request-Forgery (CSRF), SQL-Injections (SQLI), Local-File-Inclusions (LFI) etc. in website requests.
The tool is released as CGI::IDS Perl module “PerlIDS” on CPAN.org under the OpenSource “Lesser GNU Public License” (LGPL).

Read the rest of this entry »

I am now the author of two TYPO3 extensions published in TER (TYPO3 Extension Repository). These extensions are frontend plugins that add functionality to the mm_forum extension.

exinit_latesttopics displays the latest forum topics in a box, exinit_pollwidget displays an AJAX box for forum polls to make voting possible on any page.

The FOSS.in/2005 Free & Open Source Software Conference is from November 29 to December 2 at Bangalore Palace. I am listening to several lectures.
You’re welcome to join me if you are in Bangalore.