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PHPBot – Can a PHP Bot Help You Look up Documentation Faster?

syndicated from www.sitepoint.com on August 15, 2017

I came across PHPBot the other day (not to be confused with Botman or Fondbot) - a "chatbot" which helps you look up PHP manual entries and generates example code for them.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I don't believe in chatbots being chatbots - as someone who's built some for both commercial purposes and personal ones, and as someone who was around in the age of IRC auto-responding scripts, I see chatbots as a little more than a marketing fad designed to impress today's Snapchat generation. However, every now and then one will appear that's actually useful. Could this be the one? Let's take a look.

Bot welcoming image

Concept

The idea is that you use the text input on the page to enter a PHP related term (like "ksort") and the application will reply with an explanation and some example code, like so:

PHPBot's reply to <code/>ksort input

Different queries will produce different responses. So, if you ask it for echo:

PHPBot's reply to <code/>echo

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