writing formfields to a new file

Anon

Hi,

I have this question:

I use a form called 'test' with the following fields: 'name', 'adress', 'place'
(this is an example)

Now I want to create a string with the values of the fields separated by a |-sign or a ;-sign or whatever, so I can import it into MS Access or MS Excel.

Something like:
patrick|42nd street|new york

or if 1 field is left empty:
|42nd street|new york
or another one:
patrick||new york

How can I this?

A Second question:

How can I create a new text-file with a .dat extension and write the string to it.
Notice: the each time the form is being filled and submitted a new file has to be created (say: filename = patrick_date (the value of the name-field with _todays date)

Thanks in advance
Patrick

Anon

You can create the string as follows:

$exportline = $name . "|" . $address . "|" . place

To learn how to create and write to files, take a look at the manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/ref.filesystem.php

Anon

Hi Patrick,

Err... Basically what you ask us to do is do all your work ? ;-))

Concatenating a string can of course simply be accomplished by:

$c_var = $var1 . "|" . $var2 . "|" . $var3;

However, since you might not know just how many fields you have in your form, this might be more easy:

On the page that receives form input (post method!)

reset ($HTTP_POST_VARS);
$var = "";
while (list ($key, $val) = each ($HTTP_POST_VARS)) {
  $var .= "|" . $val;
}
echo $var;

Var now should show all values of the submitted formfields with "|" in between. Of course you can adapt this code for leading "|" or not etc.

I guess you could use the same code as well to output to a .dat file, after of course testing this code with a simple "echo $var" to see it worked.

After you're sure, put this before the above example code:

$fp = fopen ("d:\inetpub\wwwroot\dir\blah.dat", "w");

Perhaps followed by:

$lock = flock ( $fp, LOCK_EX);

To lock the file exclusively.

Then within the "while" change code to:
fwrite ( $fp, $var . chr(13) . chr(10) );

(chr 13 and 10 provide "CR" and "LF", so your next line is written on a new line.)

Of course, after the "while" code, add:

fclose($fp);

Anon

Ehm, on second thoughts, fwrite might better be placed outside the while, since in this case it would write to the file:

|var1
|var2
|var3

And I guess you want:

|var1|var2|var3[etc]

Anon

Thanks a lot guys!
I was in a hurry but now I know everything.
And yes I was a bit lame! sorry