PHP and Excel

[kilbey1]

I'd like to develop an application that will have someone 'register' to access special sections of a site. Then someone with a password can see the information about who has registered at their site.

What's the best way to approach this, assuming the server will not accept a database? Have info go into an Excel spreadsheet?

• Eve

[stolzyboy]

if you don't have access to a database, you would probably have to go with a tab delimited flat text file

[saronoff]

An excel spreadsheet will add characters to the file you won't want to deal with. You are better off going with a plain text file and a delimiter. For example, as suggested above, tab-delimited:

UserName\tPassword\tOther Information

Or Comma-Delimited (CSV):

UserName,Password,Other Information,More Information

With PHP you can use the explode(delimiter, text) to get the values in to an array for use.

Above the "\t" character is just an abbreviation for tab and also the character you would use in explode when specifing the delimiter. You can look up the explode function on php.net if you need more information about how it works but it does a great job for delimited file.

The only thing to remember is if you're going to use explode you have to make sure your delimiter is not placed in the file (ie. no commas if you're using CSV or no tabs if you're using tab-delimited) other then for actual delimiter. If they are present explode will work in a way you did not expect.