Using HTML tags in PHPDoc blocks

As my involvement in the dev side of WordPress grows, I’ve been working on increasing the PHPDoc comments through the major parts of the code. A particular challenge I stumbled across today was trying to talk about certain HTML tags in the comments in a way that they wouldn’t then be turned into the actual tag when phpDocumentor ran.

So basically I wanted to say something like

This function returns a properly formatted <pre>…</pre> block

However I found that doing that caused the <pre> tag to be used as part of the page when the docs were transferred to the HTML format.

The solution I discovered was to reference the tags as <<pre>> or <<br />>. This seems to preserve the tag in the finished documentation as a comment and not part of the page.

I struggled to find this in google, so though a little blog post might just help someone.

Results

I meant to post this yesterday, but I’ve become quite interested in WordPress that it slipped my mind a bit. Plus, I had to leave not long after the results came out (which they didn’t until about 5:30pm!).

In the big picture, I’m now in 3rd year :D! While this is kind of all that really matters at the end of the day, I was a little bit disappointed with the results. I felt it had went better than it obviously did, which I don’t like. That said, a number of people have failed that I really would’ve expected so in a way I’m being a bit unfair moaning at my pass.

Either way, it’s now ever and I can plan things like electives. Oh, and I can work non-stop apparently. Rejoice.

Quick test

This should hopefully go to twitter?

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Indeed it did. The plugins that finally got my setup here are Twitter Updater and Twitter Widget Pro. Took a while to find plugins that were 2.5.1 compatible but these do the trick.

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Also, I’d highly recommend Fluency Admin which makes the wordpress admin screen a whole lot neater.

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This also means the next post wasn’t result related. Oh well.

Freedom….sorta

So my exams are over, by a full week (very up-to-date…not), and I’m now enjoying a well forgotten freedom.

The results are due out on Monday so I should probably be preparing either a pass or fail post. Based on how I felt they went I’d say it should be a pass - without being too confident - but I may just be a bit too hopeful. We were told quite firmly that nothing specific from 1st year that we hadn’t covered again this year would come up in the papers.

Oh how they lied!

There was a good many marks that came from purely 1st year material. Thankfully only 1 question really stumped me and I still managed to put something down for it.

The OSCEs were pretty good, hopefully haven’t failed them. I did have to do an exam on my girlfriend which was possibly the most nervous station out of them all. She says I passed though, guess that could just be to comfort me (although I doubt it!). The introductions of the spot stations was a bugger, two came from one cell biology lab right at the start of the year and pretty much everyone was pissed off by them. According to the guy who’s marking them however they haven’t changed results too much. I hope that means 250 passes.

Following the end of exams on the Friday (and an interesting weekend) I started work on the Monday morning. By noon on the Monday I had taken blood for the first time. It was quite a nervous attempt - on our trainer no less - but I got there in the end. The mornings for the rest of the week involved us taking it from patients for real on the wards. I struggled in a number of cases but on the whole I don’t feel I did to badly. I even had the delightful pleasure of taking blood from someone’s foot!

The last day of the week involved working in a clinic. My second patient to bleed was particularly interesting. Not only could I not manage it, neither could my trainer and indeed the consultant was struggling. He finally managed though and gave us a nice chat about it and his book (Medical Biochemistry, for those interested) afterwards.

I’ve also found out that this 2 week training is followed by 4 weeks of mentoring on-site. Considering I’m contracted to do 8 hour weekends this is a bit of a bugger for me. I can’t work a full day since the service only works in the morning. I can’t go home and work because I need to be there for a month. That said, I don’t want to be working for a couple of weekends following training anyway - T in the Park!. I’m not sure what the outcome of this will be. My mum’s amazed that anyone can make you work weekdays for 6 weeks so you can eventually do the weekends, which is what the contract is for. To be honest, I see her point. Although I have no actual contact…yet.

On the off-chance anyone reading this has any use for a PHP dev/tech support/general layabout in the UK, feel free to get in touch. I’d prefer to be paid but if you’ve got something remotely interesting then I might be tempted to get involved regardless.

Next post will like to be result related. Eek!

“It’s tomorrow?”, “Oh shit…”

Yes, it finially is tomorrow and am I ready? No idea. I think and certainly hope so but I can never really be sure. I could probably not have done much more in the way of working for it, although I did retreat home today for a BBQ. That might not have been the smartest move and I’m sure if I do fail some of the blame will go there but I honestly needed to relax and forget about medicine.

I’ve planned to head to the swimming pool (or certainly the sauna) straight after before heading into the SL to revise for the one on Tuesday. This will hopefully calm me down from what I expect won’t be my most enjoyable 2.5hrs.

Whilst I’m trying to work out what is coming up in my exam, the rest of the world’s geek community seems to be trying to work out what’s coming up in the new iPhone, suggested to be revealed in Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Moscone Center tomorrow. So far I’ve heard rumours that it’ll be faster (3G, almost certainly), thinner, cheaper (interesting one for me!) and colourful. I may end up buying a iPod Touch over the summer but if any and ideally all these rumours are true I may just head for the iPhone. The fact my current phone is less than a year old makes me realise just how much of a geek I really would be.

Still though….the iPhone….

Simple things

With 4 and a bit days to go till my exams start today I finished my final PBL scenario of the year (alcoholic liver disease). Personally I considered it a horrid final scenario but wonder if the idea was to put us off drinking too much following the exam. Good luck.

Whilst finishing the questions I came across a sentence about liver function tests that I felt just had to be explained like so:

if ($g_gt > G_GT_NORM) AND ($alk_phos == ALK_P_NORM)
{
$patient = “boozer”;
}
else
{
$patient = “complicated”;
}
die($patient);

I felt like I needed to come on here and reflect upon the sadness (and difficulties, I made many mistakes!) of writing code in my notes. In conclusion I’ve decided the stress has finally got to me.
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