file read

Anon

The text file contains a link, |, and a number

eg
http://www.somesite.com|1
http://www.othersite.com|1

it is basically a log file, What I need to do is be able to update this and read it...

So if someone clicks on myscript.php?http://www.somesite.com it will be incremented by 1.

Can someone please get me started on how to do this.

Another thing that I want on a seperate php script is to read it for my admin page.

function read_file() {
$fp=fopen($filename, "r");
etc....
}

function update_file() {
$fp=fopen($filename, "a");
etc....
}

this is all i could figure out so far, can anyone else fill in the rest...thanx!

Anon

[text file containing e.g.]
http://www.somesite.com|1
...
it is basically a log file, What I need to do is be able to update this
and read it...

So if someone clicks on myscript.php?http://www.somesite.com it
will be incremented by 1.

This will be an unbelievable performance killer. You really need a
database; doing on a text file involves:

open the text file for reading
lock the file
create a new temporary file
read the file line by line
  if the line is the url you want
    increment the count
  write the line to the temp file
close the files
remove the original file
rename the temp file to the original name

Omigosh, there's a race condition in those last three steps;
somebody else can begin step 1 right after you close the
original file...

One possible fix for this is to create the original files with a
large-enough fixed space format for the number, e.g.
  http://www.somesite.com|0000000001

Then you could open the file in "r+" mode, lock it,
scan sequentially until you find the target URL,
fseek() backwards to the beginning of the number,
overwrite it with the new quantity, and close the
file. But this is still far inferior to having a database...

Anon

Well the text file will only contain 100 lines at most!

I would go to Mysql but i want to keep it simple!

Can you please help me write the code, I don't know all the php codes to write it out...

I want to have to seperate peices of code for each line, the url and the number

so I can write my html code like this...

<table border="1">
<tr><td>$url goes here</td><td>$num of times the file was downloaded here</td></tr>
</table>

Anon

As it's only a small file:
-Read the file into an array.
-Modify the array as required.
-Save the array back to a the file.

If the file gets bigger, I'd change the file to have a fixed-line-length.
That way, you can seek inside the file, without having to read everything.
You can then also update data in the middle of the file without writing the whole file.

BTW, unless you have to install a database from scratch,
using a database is much simpler than using a textfile.

Anon

what database would you recommend for beginners... something that's easy to create/manage/update

Anon

MySQL!
www.mysql.com