This is really easily achievable on UNIX systems using the .forward (dot forward) file and your scripting language of choice. If you wanted to pipe all of root’s mail into a script, you would create a .forward file in that user’s home directory, consisting of a single line, starting with a pipe, followed by the full process path.

|/root/process.php

Then you need to provide a destination processor for your email. In this case we have used a UNIX-style file processor at the start by using the hashbang syntax:

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php

// read from stdin
$fp = fopen('php://stdin', 'r');
while(!feof($fp)) {
$lines[]=fgets($fp, 4096);
}

[... email processing code...]
?>

You can then use an optional MIME decoder such as Pear mimeDecode to break up the email into the relevant sections – for instance, the from/to fields and plain and/or HTML body text.

It’s occurred to me how these very easy techniques seem inaccessible to many people, so I thought I’d post a few bits and bobs about some basic scraping methods.

Here’s a bit of code I wrote to use PHP’s DOMDocument class to treat a HTML page as XML and fetch, in this case, the incredibly useful current world population… fantastic!

<?php
 // where to find population data...
 $location['url']='http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html';
 $location['id']='worldnumber';

 // initialise a new document and prepare the data
 $d=new DOMDocument();
 $file = file_get_contents($location['url']);

 // get and print current world population
 $d->loadHTML($file);
 $e=$d->getElementById($location['id']);
 print $e->nodeValue;
?>

Sample output: 6,738,610,278

Too many times I’ve seen my code swell with foreach loops, looking for elements with a certain property, or to call a function of each object in an array. Additionally making sure the keys of an array match one particular property and stay in sink with them. So to try and side step all these I’m started Vector, I’m sure others have done similar, but reinvention is one of the fun things about being a programmer (and one of the few things which make it similar to being an artist).

So here’s how you use Vector currently:

<?php

require_once('Vector.class.php');
require_once('User.example.class.php');


//initialize a Vector and add a index that uses the username field of each object entered into the array
$users=new Vector();
$users->addIndex('username');


//add two objects of class User into the vector
$users->addObject($frank=new User('frank.n.stein','monster'));
$users->addObject($vlad=new User('count.dracula','vampire'));


//call the checkpassword method of the object whose username is count.dracula
if($users->exists('username','count.dracula') && $users->username['count.dracula']->checkPassword('vampire'))
{
echo 'password correct!';
}
else
{
echo 'password false';
}
?>

I hope to include more features later. But it’s a start.