Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Generating fake test data


Part of the testing and debugging process involves incorporating realistic test data. In some cases, especially when testing database access and producing benchmarks, large amounts of test data are needed. One way in which this can be accomplished is to incorporate a process of scraping data from websites, and then putting the data together in realistic, yet random, combinations to be inserted into a database.

How to do it...

  1. The first step is to determine what data is needed in order to test your application. Another consideration is dose the website address an international audience, or will the market be primarily from a single country?

  2. In order to produce a consistent fake data tool, it's extremely important to move the data from its source into a usable digital format. The first choice is a series of database tables. Another, not as attractive, alternative is a CSV file.

  3. You may end up converting the data in stages. For example, you could pull data from a web page...