Pulling data from near-end of file

Anon

Hi folks...

I'm playing with some code I'm trying to write - I'm pretty crap but we all have to start somewhere. Basically, I have a file which contains a load of data. I need to pull the second from last item out of the file, and as the file is of varying length, I can't use the my normal method.

The end of the file looks like this :-

|981936627|Rich|127.0.0.1

I don't need the IP address at the end - well, not at the moment anyway - I just need the name next to it. In front of all that stuff can be anything between 5 fields and 500 fields, so I can't just open the file and parse through it.

If any magic workers are out there, some basic code to get me started would be excellent.

Thanks a lot,

Rich
www.mad-gamers.org.uk

Anon

The easiest way I can think to do this right now is:

$fp = ("file.txt", "r');

$text = "";
while (!feof($fp)) {
$text .= fread($fp, 4096);
}
$items = array();
$items = explode("|", $text);

$last = end($items);
$next_to_last = prev($items);

This will read your file into a variable, split up that variable into an array on the | character, and then go to the last element in the array, and finally choose the next to last element in the array.

Anon

From the results I'm getting, I don't appear to be loading the file properly?

My code is :-

print "opening file ";
$fp = ('http://localhost/tzdata/1.txt', 'r');
print "File opened ";
print "$fp ";
$text = "";
while (!feof($fp)) {
$text .= fread($fp, 4096);
}
print "$text ";
$items = array();
$items = explode("|", $text);

$last = end($items);
$next_to_last = prev($items);
print "$last";

With that code, the results I get on my screen at home are

opening file
File opened
r

So I'm assuming it isn't actually opening the file, it's just filling the $fp variable with "r"? I'm confused, just in case you hadn't noticed 🙂.

Cheers,

Rich

Anon

Ok, first off $fp is a handler it doesn't actually hold the file. If there is a problem opening the file then $fp should be set to 0. Also you have http://localhost as the way to get to the file. If the file is on the same machine as the webserver then just call it with it's full path. Also makesure that the file is readable by the user that the webserver is running as, usually nobody or www. (ps -fe | grep 'http') is the unix command to figure this out. So try this.print "opening file ";
$fp = ('fullpath/to/1.txt', 'r');

if ($fp) {
print "File opened ";
}
else {
print "Couldn't open file! ";
}

$text = "";
while (!feof($fp)) {
$text .= fread($fp, 4096);
}
print "$text ";
$items = array();
$items = explode("|", $text);

$last = end($items);
$next_to_last = prev($items);
print "$last";

This will atleast let you know if you've actually opened up the file.