Help w/ Text file "database"

[rdrnnr]

Hi,

I'm writing a user login/reg piece for a client who is hosted on an ISP who does not offer any relational database. (how lame!! hint: begins with earth and ends with link)

I figured it would not be too hard to do something with PHP and a text file, which could have tab-delimited rows. It's a simple solution for a simple site, there will only be one table.

Does anyone have any general advice on doing this? The only potential pitfall I can forsee is a bottleneck with file locking, but there won't be a ton of traffic. Or if you know of some good OSS links for a project like this, please share!

Thanks!
-rdrnnr

[Sxooter]

Does your ISP provide GDBM (or any other DBM) style file handling in PHP? That's a nice way to go since all the works been done fo ya in terms of a simple hash style database.

[ucbones]

Basically, txt files work fine until two users attempt to access them at one time, at which point they are deleted. If this is unlikely to be a problem then use txt files, they worked fine for me! I reckon the best way to do it is actually not to have one txt file, but to have a different one for each user, it is much simpler, coding wise to have a line that reads

$usernamefile="/path/to/your/server/users/$username.txt";
if (file_exists($usernamefile)){
//check password
}
else {
echo "Sorry, who are you?";
}

Hope this helps,

ucbones
😃

[michael]

try flock() =)