redirecting to a specific url

[Anon]

hi,

i am setting up my website, and have created a system where by, when
index.php?action=goto&url=www.website.com is executed it redirects to the website.

What i want to do, is get PHP to parse a table to find the url

eg. supposing it was a redirect to websites for school subjects,

index.php?subject=art

the php would then cross reference this to an external table and redirect it to the appropriate url.

can this be achieved, the table would only be a csv file or simple text file, as SQL is not available

thank you very much

simon

[[deleted]]

Yes this is possible.
Once you have the URL from the textfile, you can simply say

Header("Location: http://whatever.com");
exit;

and that's it.
Remember that header's must the FIRST thing to be sent to a client, and
because this is a redirect, whatever else you send doesn't show up. (hence the exit after the header)

[Anon]

but how would i go about extracting the url from the text file, there seems to be loads of info about extracting it from sql but none from a plain text file

[[deleted]]

That'a because using plain text files is usually a 'worst case scenario'.
Plaintext files can be read by many scripts, but only one script can write to it at a time. That makes it allmost unusable for database-like applications.

The simplest way is to create a file is like this:

forums|www.phpbuilder.com
php|www.php.net
pengiuns|www.penguinpower.com

You can then open that file using fopen()
and read from it line by line, using fgets().
Then you can get the data from each line using split():
list($sSubject, $sURL) = split("|", $line_from_file);

Then you can compare $sSubject to the subject you are looking for.
If the $sSubject matches, redirect to the URL.
If not, continue to the next line from the file.