Reading a textfile

[Anon]

Hi,
I have a textfile with data for a guestbook, like this:

name:messgage goes here:date goes here
name:messgage goes here:date goes here
name:messgage goes here:date goes here

I want to be able to split the data so I can print it in a nice, presentable fashion.

So, I can separate each entry by exploding the contents of the file by \n. So I have an array containing each line of the file. But how can I split the file further into each individual piece of the entry.

I have this so far:

$filename = "/data/data.dat";
$fp = @fopen($filename,r);
$contents = fread ($fp,filesize($filename));
$separate_msgs = explode("\n",$contents);
@fclose($fp);

foreach($separate_msgs as $value) {
echo"<P>$value</P>\n";
}

Any help would be great,

Cheers,

Jord

[Anon]

You can try this in your foreach:

$row = split(':', $value);

$row[0] = name

$row[1] = message

$row[2] = date

This does assume that you will not have colons (🙂 in your message or date.

[Anon]

Thanks Chad,
It worked, but I ended up using explode instead of split because in the PHP manual it says it's faster than split in you don't need regex.

Thanks for you help,

Cheers,

Jord