Writing to a TXT file from a HTML form

[visualaddiction]

Hi all, I hope you can help me. I am a complete newbie and having a problem. I need to be able to write to a txt file on a server using a html form as its interface. Basically I want an individual to be able to add text to this file, which is loaded into flash to display its contents. Its for a band so they can update their gig-list without me having to do it.

I have done the flash bit, and just need to work out how to write to this txt file.

I have read some books and looked at other scripts but they always seem to do way too much than what I need and i'm not at the level where I can edit them.

I would appreciate any help at all

Thanks
Colin

Email me with any ideas

[danville]

visualaddiction
Try using the fopen to open a file and fputs to write to the file.

<?

//The "a" is to append to the file.
$out = fopen("output.txt", "a");
if (!$out) {
print("Could not append to file");
exit;
}

fputs($out,"$name\t");
fputs($out,"$yearborn\t");
fputs($out,"$favcolor\t");
fputs($out,"$REMOTE_ADDR\n");
print("Thanks you for completing our survey. You have been assimilated");

fclose($out);

?>

[theeper]

Just a note, you may want to concatenate your strings into one variable and do only one fputs(), should be a bit faster.

<? 
//The "a" is to append to the file. 
$out = fopen("output.txt", "a"); 
if (!$out) { 
print("Could not append to file"); 
exit; 
} 
$string = "$name\t"."$yearborn\t"."$favcolor\t"."$REMOTE_ADDR\n"; 
fputs($out,"$string");
print("Thanks you for completing our survey. You have been assimilated"); 

fclose($out); 

?>

[visualaddiction]

thanks guys, you have helped a lot. Just a few other things though, I want the text to be put at the beginning of the file without deleting what is already there, I gather that by using the "a" append it would add the text to the end of the file? am I right in thinking i would use "r+"?

also would you know of a good book that you can recommend, I have looked at the dummies guide but it concentrated too much on examples and not actually explaining code and syntax..

Thanks guys

[marcnyc]

You can't use r+ because that overwrites starting at the beginning of your file, it doesn't push what is there forward to make space for your new entry (I was under that assumption too, the first time I read that part of the manual).

To do what you need to, I think (I'm a beginner too) you have to have your data into an array so that you can reverse their order when you display it... In other words the oldest entry will be last in the actual file but when you pull the information from the file you show the oldest first, by reversing the array...

I have an example here taken from a guestbook file that does this:

	if ($action=="view"){
		echo $viewguestbook;
		// When there is no data file, create a new one and say there are no entries.
		if (!file_exists($filelocation)) {
		$newfile = fopen($filelocation,"w+");
		fclose($newfile);
		echo "There are no entries yet";
		}
		// Open the datafile and read the content
		$newfile = fopen($filelocation,"r");
		$content = fread($newfile, filesize($filelocation));
		fclose($newfile);
		// Remove the slashes PHP automatically puts before special characters
		$content=stripslashes($content);
		// Put the entries into the array lines
		$lines = explode("%",$content);
		// Define and fill the reverse array (showing the last entry first)
		$rev=array();
              $f=0;
              for ($i=sizeof($lines)-1;$i>=1;$i--){
              $rev[$f]=$lines[$i];
              $f++;
              }
		$lines=$rev;
		// Display all the entries of the guestbook
		while(list($key)= each ($lines)){
			/*
			/ split the data lines into a user array
			/ user[0] is the name, [1] is the email, [2] is the url [3] is the date and [4] the message
			*/
			$countryadd="";
			$urladd="";
			$mailadd="";
			$user = explode("#",$lines[$key]);
			// if there is a country, display a country
			if ($user[6] != ""){$countryadd="".$user[6]."  ";}
			// if there is an email, display an email link
			if ($user[2] != ""){$mailadd="<a href=\"mailto:".$user[2]."\"><img src=\"/images/icons/email_@.gif\" border=0 align=\"absmiddle\" alt=\"[email]\"></a>&nbsp;";}
			// if there is a url, display a link
			if ($user[3] != ""){
				// if people were dumb enough not to add [url]http://[/url] do so 
				if (substr($user[3],0,7)!= "http://"){
					$user[3]="http://".$user[3];
				}
				$urladd="<a href=\"".$user[3]."\" target=\"new\"><img src=\"/images/icons/world.gif\" border=0 align=\"absmiddle\" alt=\"[website]\"></a>&nbsp;";
			}
			// Display the entries, here you can tweak HTML
			echo "
			<dl><dt><b>$user[1]</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;$mailadd&nbsp;$urladd&nbsp;&nbsp;$countryadd&nbsp;($user[4])<BR><BR>
			</dt><dd>$user[5]</dd>\n</dl><CENTER><hr width=\"95%\"></CENTER><BR>";
			}
	}

Since I have the same problem right now, if somebody has a better solution please let us know!