If you’ve ever used PHP, you’ve probably used, or at least seen, the PRINTF and/or SPRINTF functions. These oldie, but goodie, functions are stolen… err… borrowed from the old C language world. Both functions support the abililty to have placeholders, which when evaluated, are replaced with the value in a comma-delimited list in the appropriate position. For example:

printf("My name is %s. I am %i years old", $name, $age);

This code, given that $name equals “Adam”, and $age equals “30” will output “My name is Adam. I am 30 years old”. A nifty feature.

Below is a bit of code that provides a class that will take a given input SQL string, an array of arguments, and spit out a parsed SQL string. An example of usage would look like so:

$userId = 30;$parser = new SqlScriptParser("SELECT name, email, active FROM users WHERE userId=%i", array($userId));$result = $parser->Parse();

The resulting string would look like:

SELECT name, email, active FROM users WHERE userId=30

The code: http://www.adampresley.com/downloads/code/php/sqlScriptParser.zip

Note: This ZIP file got lost over time.