Dynamic link/page question thing

[ZakNafien]

Hi ok got a question for you here.

I’m working on a script at the moment and I have it working fine 'but' I would like to know if anyone knows of a better way it can be done?

What I have is a list of links that pass a value through to the next page when clicked such as

<?php
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/test.php?link=4">click here to display</a>
?>

now the next page is a template page with this code inserted in (this is only a snippet but it's the same over and over.)

<?php

if ( $link == "1" ) { include("test.txt"); }

elseif ( $link == "2" ) { include("test2.txt"); }

elseif ( $link == "3" ) { include("test3.txt"); }

elseif ( $link == "4" ) { include("test4.txt"); }

else ( print "Im sorry this page is not available, please try again later.");

?>

As you can see depending on what link they click it pulls the appropriate text file and displays it, but the variable query becomes over 300 lines long as the content I want to display has over 300 possibilities.

I have roughly 12 lists each with over 300 links to choose from. That’s 300 lines of code in 12 different pages.

Does anyone know of a more efficient way of doing this? Will it drastically slow down my pages if I do it this way? or will the speed, in which it checks and loads the file, be negligible?

Cheers in advance
Zak

[nnichols]

If the link between value passed for "$link" and the file to include is that simple I would use something like this -

if ($_GET['link']) {
$disp_file = 'test' . $_GET['link'] . '.txt';
$check = check_file_exists($disp_file);

if ($check) {
	include("$disp_file");
	}
else {
	print "Im sorry this page is not available, please try again later."
	}
}

function check_file_exists($file) {

// check to see if file exists and return true or false
// just use fopen() to check to see if the file exists

}

This is only a rough idea but you should be able to get the picture.

Hope this helps 😉

[ZakNafien]

Ah i kinda see where your trying to point me to.

i'll have a play around at work tonight see what i come up with.

🙂