how can i assosiate stuff to names?

[ShawnD]

i'm trying to hone my skills here and try something new. this is just a learning thing i'm doing here so don't rag me on the security behind it 🙂

on this test page of mine, it checks if you are logged in or not and if you are it will say things like "hello $name" and what not. if not registered it will ask to register so you fill in your name and desired password and it will save it encrypted into a file.

the question is how to associate the name to the password?

[MrAlaska]

The most common way is through the database which each row would contain a name and password, but you could do it using flat files stored with name/password pairs.

What is the part you don't understand? The encryption? You would save the encrypted form of the password, then when they log in again you would encrypt the submitted password using the same method and compare that with the encrypted password you stored.

[ShawnD]

yeah but i'm not using a database here, how can i tie the password to the name?

since i'm here... how would i check the password too? how would i make the system 'retrieve' the password stored in the file?

[ednark]

you could use this as a simple databse

look into the function parse_ini_file
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-ini-file.php

#users.ini
[users]
ednark=ednark_password
ShawnD=ShawnD_password
MrAlaska=MrAlaska_password

gives you

$file = parse_ini_file('users.ini',TRUE);
$file = array(
    'users' => array(
        'ednark'=>'ednark_password',
        'ShawnD'=>'ShawnD_password',
        'MrAlaska'=>'MrAlaska_password',
    )
)

if you do this than you need to worry about adding, removing, and updating specific values of the file.