Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 22nd November 2021

htmlspecialchars was a very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash distribution of function names across the various function name lengths names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn’t too worried about not being able to remember the few function names.

Rasmus Lerdorf # 7:23 pm

Introduction to heredocs in Dockerfiles (via) This is a fantastic upgrade to Dockerfile syntax, enabled by BuildKit and a new frontend for executing the Dockerfile that can be specified with a #syntax= directive. I often like to create a standalone Dockerfile that works without needing other files from a directory, so being able to use <<EOF syntax to populate configure files from inline blocks of code is really handy. # 5:01 pm

Weeknotes: Apache proxies in Docker containers, refactoring Datasette

Updates to six major projects this week, plus finally some concrete progress towards Datasette 1.0.

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Hurl (via) Hurl is “a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format”—written in Rust on top of curl, it lets you run HTTP requests and then execute assertions against the response, defined using JSONPath or XPath for HTML. It can even assert that responses were returned within a specified duration. # 3:32 am

2021 » November

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