reading a file help

[Anon]

Here is my situation...

I have a text file that follows this format

username|password|email|firstname|lastname
username|password|email|firstname|lastname
username|password|email|firstname|lastname
username|password|email|firstname|lastname

Now when the user enters their email address, I want the script to find the line with their email address and take the username and password and email it to them. Basically I know how to send the email and explode the file to find a matching email. But how do I know what line the email is on so I can tell the script to go to this line, and read it into an array and just take the username and password out?

Please explain it and write the code. Thanks!

[Anon]

Dear John, AKA Nick R, AKA Mark H, AKA Joe S, AKA Mike R, AKA Donald J,

I would like to respectfully suggest that you either learn PHP yourself or hire someone to write it for you. The purpose of the coding forum is to help people who are trying to produce PHP. It's not an appropriate place to try to con people into writing your code for you.

[Anon]

you may have to take each line at a time and check that line. Are the lines sorted by email?
Are you on UNIX? you may be able to use grep to find the line.

Have you considered a database such as MySQL?

[Anon]

Thanks for the heads up Beth. I'll definatly not help this scrub.

[Anon]

to beth and tom: John, Nick, Mark, Donald, and Joe (me) use the same email account to ask people for help on php. We are creating a project for ourselves and we only know a limited amount of PHP. So we ask others to give us advice or source code. Another reason for sharing this email and account is so people like you who look at the hidden email accounts don't spam all our email's, just this one. I hope this cleared up any confusion!

As for Bill...

I'm using a simple text file on a Unix/Linux server. What is the best way to go about reading the lines and finding the email to match with the username and password.

[Anon]

This'll be my last post to the thread as I don't generally flame flame wars but if you've got that many people all connecting from the same @home account, how can you -not- figure it out yourselves?

Over my lunch I've been thinking of cron'ing a php script to parse these forums for 24.180.104.8 posts and reply w/ a list of questions also asked by the same ip. I probably won't do it but it would be a fun project.