retrieving variables from files

[8ride]

Is there a way to look in a .php file and get a variable from it to use in another file?

For example, the site I am working on now has many seperate files for updates (up1.php, up2.php,etc.). Each of these files have 3 variables:
$Title
$Author
$Date

There is an archive section for updates and I would like to display them as [Title][Author][Date] in a table using a while loop to generate them. The problem is, I have no way of getting the title, author and date from each update file. I am clueless here, I know I should be using a database to do this but I have absolutly no clue how to use databases (but I plan to learn eventuall).

[sijis]

why don't you create a vars.inc.php file and have those variables there?

so you can include the vars.inc.php file into up1.php, up2.php, and so on..

the files would be like this:

vars.inc.php

$Title_up1 = "Title Update 1";
$Author_up1 = "Me";
$Date_up1 = "3/2/03";
$Title_up2 = "Title Update 2";
$Author_up2 = "New Author";
$Date_up2 = "3/12/03";
......
(you can alternatively use define();
http://www.php.net/define

up1.php

include 'vars.inc.php';
echo $Title_up1;
// rest of your page content

up2.php

include 'vars.inc.php';
echo $Title_up2;
// rest of page content...

and so on...

If you don't want to go that route...
You can use fopen() to open the file and
some sort of regular expression or string/array search
look into: strstr(), in_array(), file_get_contents()

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

[8ride]

Thanks sijis, I can see this working although I am having other related problems (see my other post).