Displaying contents of text file?

Anon

Hi people,

The code I'm working with is this:

(in the index.php file)
<? $news_file = "../news/news-main.txt"; require ("news/news.php3"); ?>

(in the news.php3 file)
<?
$news = file($news_file)
echo $news
?>

The contents of news-main.txt is html code, but it will not display on my page. All I see is the word, 'Array' appear in its place.

The really frustrating thing is that I had it working, until I trimmed down the code, but nothing I have removed was necessary, since it was taken from a sample script.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks a lot 🙂

Anon

You problem is you can't echo an array only a string. You need to setup a loop to print the array if you want to do it like this. something like

foreach($news as $news_item)
{
echo $news_item;
}

or you could just use readfile(); if your file is already formatted.

does it help?

bobbisson

All you gotta do is to write
include($news_file);
in your news.php3!

Anon

Much appreciated 🙂

Anon

Can you explain a little further how this would help the actual problem. I am not completely clear ont he difference between include/require. so how would it allow printing of this file?

Anon

Very quickly, I've changed the code to this:

<? echo readfile("../news/news-main.txt") ?>

Now the HTML in the file is formatted perfectly - but it is adding a number to the end of it - a number which seems to correlate exactly to the number of characters in the .txt file I'm displaying.

Does this make sense?
Have you ever seen it before?

Thanks for your help,

David

bobbisson

That's simple. When you "include" a file that contains no starting/closing php tags (<? ?>), PHP just puts contents of that file to the stdout (the same effect as "echo readfile()"). That is, it works like SSI in this case.