Text File Manipulation

[cyberfez]

I am a newbie to PHP and I was wondering how I can get a php app to edit a textfile. I have looked up fopen etc. but still am at a loss.

I want to edit a config file online. ie.The script opens the file > finds the relevant spot in the file > either add/change settings (without upsetting or changing the rest of the file). then save the file again with the new settings.

Can you post an example?

cyberfez

[nashirak]

If this file is on a remote server and you are at computer A and trying via HTTP through a script on remoter server A trying to edit a file on server B. Forget it it wont work. However if you are on server B and trying to edit a file via a webpage that is possible. Just so you know. OK first things first you need to chmod the file (change permissions) to read and write to a file... then comes the script:

// Open the file up
// Open for reading and writing

$fp = fopen("file.conf","r+");
$i = 0;

$change = "ChangeSomething = ";
$notFound = -1;

while(feof($fp)) {

$line[$i] = fgets($fp,1000);

if($line == $change) {

$notFound = $i;

}//end if

$i++;
}// end while

$line[$i] = "Whatever you change it to";

fclose($fp);

$fp = fopen("file.conf","w");

for($j = 0; $j < sizeof($line); $j++)
fputs($fp,$line[$j]);

fclose($fp);

Now I have not tested this code and you could add some more logic to see if this is the line of not. Mabye some ereg to take out cases or something... its up to your imagination... just remember extra logic takes time. This algorithm also assumes that there is an option for the config file on each line and that the line equals this exactly... so its pretty limited as is... but this should get you started.

Hope this Helps!

[cyberfez]

Thanks heaps

but it did not work. It does however edit the file but it replaced the file contents completely with the contents of $line[$i] after the //end while and not edit just the single line. Any ideas? Any pages you can point me to on the php.net site?

This also poses another question to me that some of the conf files have settings that are multiple lines. I am guessing that this will be able to replace a single line with a bunch of lines etc.

Raph

[Anon]

Another way to do this is to not deal with parsing through the text at all and just write the variable names and the user specified content to the file and overwrite it each time. If you had two variables to write, you'd could have two text input fields in a script that would post to itself. The values would be concatenated into a string along with the variable names. The string is written to a file using fopen() and fputs().

A simple one would look like this.

<?
if ($update == "yes") {
$config_text = "<?php\n\$var_1 = \"$var_1\";\n\$var_2 = \"$var_2\";\n?>";
$filename="config.php";
$file = fopen($filename, "w");
fputs($file, $config_text);
fclose($file);
}

include ('config.php');
?>
<form action="<?=$PHP_SELF; ?>" method="post">
<input type=hidden name="update" value="yes">
<input name=var_1 value="<?=$var_1; ?>">
<input name=var_2 value="<?=$var_2; ?>">
<input type=submit>
</form>

You need to set proper permissions on the config file, and it is a good idea to use a file extension that your system parses as a PHP doc,so it doesn't print out in the browser for the world to see.

[cyberfez]

That is a cool method but some of these conf files are not .php files nor executed to grab those variables. The only way is to edit text. Thanks though cos that is a cool tip.

Raph

[cyberfez]

This is what I had in perl - I just want to do the same now that I am converting to PHP.

-----snippet
#!/usr/bin/perl

#add user to system 🙂

$username = @ARGV[0];
$domain_name = @ARGV[1];

#add apache vhost

cp -f /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf.last.bak;

undef $/;
open(CONF,"/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf") || die("can't open httpd.conf: $!\n");
flock(CONF,2);
$httpdconf = <CONF>;
close(CONF);
$/ =1;

$newvhost .= "<VirtualHost 203.109.175.135>\n";
$newvhost .= " ServerAdmin webmaster@$domain_name\n";
$newvhost .= " DocumentRoot /home/$username/public_html\n";
$newvhost .= " ServerName $domain_name\n";
$newvhost .= " ServerAlias www.$domain_name\n";
$newvhost .= " ErrorLog /home/$username/logs/error_log\n";
$newvhost .= " CustomLog /home/$username/logs/access_log common\n";
$newvhost .= " User $username\n";
$newvhost .= " Group users\n";
$newvhost .= " Options Indexes Includes ExecCGI SymLinksIfOwnerMatch\n";
$newvhost .= "</VirtualHost>\n";
$newvhost .= "#EndVhostsConfig\n";

$httpdconf =~ s/#EndVhostsConfig/$newvhost/;
$newhttpdconf = $httpdconf;

open (NEWCONF,">/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf") || die("Can't open httpd.conf for writing: $!\n");
flock(NEWCONF,2);
print NEWCONF "$newhttpdconf";
close (NEWCONF);

print "new vhost added.\n";

print "adduser.pl finished.\n\n";
print "System account, master email and Apache Vhost has been set-up.\n";
print "You should now do dns for this domain and add this account to the user database.\n";