writing array to file.

xr721

i dont understand why its not working. im just trying to put the contents of the file info.txt into an array, then store it into a variable. so i can fwrite it back into the file, after ive added new input from a form. (guestbook w/out dbase)
i can output it usin echo but cant fwrite $b to the file.

obviousley im new to this. im just making this to learn some php. if you can tell me WHY this doesnt work, instead of perhaps just telling me what would work, id appreciate it.
Also if you could recommend any beginner tutorials that perhaps helped you to learn php OR whats a good area of php for newbies to start..like guestbooks? polls? ?
thank you
$info = file(\\"info.txt\\");
$foo = count($info);
for($a=0;$a<$foo;$a++) {
$b = $info[$a];
$fp = fopen(\\"info.txt\\", \\"w\\");
fwrite($fp, $b);
fclose($fp);
}

sridhar

Hi,

1) I don't know why you have so many \ (backslash) characters before the quotes?

2) Anyway, The reason it is not working is because you are calling fopen every time you run through the loop. When you call fopen with the "w" argument, it removes the file first if it already exists and creates a new one. When you run through the look and open the file every time you are writing a line, only your last line would get inserted into the file.

Here is what I suggest:
- move the fopen() code OUTside the for() loop
- move the fclose() code outside the for

so it will look something like this:

$fd = fopen("file.txt", "w");
for(....) {
...some code...
...fwrite....
}
fclose($fd);

hope this helps,
-sridhar

P.S. If you want to know how I learnt PHP, it was through online tutorials and basically looking at the manual and other people's code. I found books ABSOLUTELY useless. maybe other disagree, but give the online content a try first before buying books :-)

xr721

hey it worked thanks alot!!!
hey if you pop back in here, let me know of some sites/articles that really helped you learn php, or perhaps programming in general. (if you remember em)
oh yeah i have no idea why those backslashes are there. haha. i musta did something, dunno.
again thanks alot for your help.

sridhar

I learned PHP in late 1999, but I was using Perl extensively then. So I already had a lot of knowledge prior to learn PHP. if you program perl, you know that it is very similar. So I started by trying the examples on articles such as the ones on this site. Some other sites that were useful are:

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/PHP/

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/index.phtml/fid/51/

The Faqts site is hecka good when you have a specific question. I generally use it for Javascript (cause they have like a million questions answered there), but they have a pretty good PHP question repository as well.

One more advice: use the manual and try out as many functions as you can. sometimes they are really worth using and will be important when you are trying to code something long or tedious. Many functions also provide shortcuts for stuff you'll end up writing forever by yourself :-)

hope these sites help,
-sridhar

frymaster

"hecka"? man, am i out of the loop...

the devshed 101-series is HIGHLY reccommended. i learn best by looking a source code and trying to fathom it. check out the code library and go through some of those or if you're really ambitious, get some full apps off of freshmeat.net and peruse those.

kparker

oh yeah i have no idea why those backslashes are there

If you post something but the validation fails, you get the posting form back with your data pre-entered in the fields. Nice touch, except the author forgot to call strip_slashes() to take out the extra backslashed (put in automatically by PHP.)

Whenever I get into this situation (usually browsing from a new machine so it doesn't automatically prefill my name and email address) I just use the BACK button to go back to the original filled-out form and fill in the missing fields there.

xr721

thanks alot for the tips/links on learnin php and for explaining why i got all those backslashes in my post. it was very helpful.
🙂