PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor 3.0 (PHP 3)

Techopedia explains PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor 3.0 (PHP 3)

PHP was designed by Rasmus Lerdorf as a personal project called personal home page, the genesis of PHP. The entire module was rewritten by a team of six programmers and then called PHP 3.0. The language gained popularity because of its active development environment and because it was free downloadable software.

The concepts of Perl, Java and C have been implemented in PHP 3.0, making the language convenient to understand. PHP 3.0 has the ability to perform highly complex mathematical calculations and provide network information, simplifying the writing of a database-enabled Web page.

PHP supports database servers like MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, MSQL, Generic ODBC, PostgreSQL, dbase, Velocis, Filepro, Informix and Adabas D.

Some of the most significant features of PHP 3.0 are:

1. HTTP authentication is available only when running as an Apache module.
2. GIF creation can be done apart from creating interactive and dynamic HTML web pages.
3. File upload helps to upload both text and binary files. PHP is capable of supporting uploads from any browser following RFC-1867.
4. File authentication and logical functions give PHP an opportunity to monitor and control who uploads files and what is done with them.
5. HTTP cookies are supported by PHP.
6. Database support and integration is given in both modes, native and ODBC.
7. Error handling and reporting levels identify four different types of errors and warnings. These are:

1. Normal Function Errors
2. Normal Warnings
3. Parser Errors
4. Notices - warnings that can be ignored but may imply a bug in the code

Regular expressions are another feature. These are used for complex string manipulation. The functions that support regular expressions are:

1. ereg
2. ereg_replace
3. eregi
4. eregi_replace
5. split