Flat File Help

alvinshaffer

I am just learning PHP and I am trying to setup a quick database style lookup with a flat file.

I understand how to open the file and load it into an array, and then how to call certian locations out of that array and echo them.

My Project is:

Have a flat file with ID|KEYWORD

What I want to do is search for an ID, and then post the related keyword to another HTML page.

Any help, or good resources on this subject?

Thanks

matt_4013

OK, you know how to read each row into an array, so you've got the hard bit down 🙂

What you need to do then, is loop through each line, and explode() your row.

$id = "3"; // Set the id you're looking for

// Loop through the array
foreach($FileArray as $Key=>$Value) {

// explode the line into another array
$Row = explode("|", $Value);

if($Row[0] == $id) {

	// If the id is the same as the Row ID, set it to the result var
	$result = $Row[1];
	break; // Break out of the foreach loop
}
}

alvinshaffer

Thanks Matt.

I will give that a try today

alvinshaffer

Matt,

Could you show me you array method used to read the flat file. I think I might not be doing it the best way.

Thanks

matt_4013

Well, there's a few ways to go about it. The absolute easiest is like this:

$sFilePath = "/path/to/file";
$aFile = file($sFilePath);

But you'll need to strip newline characters with this method, so you do this:

$sFilePath = "/path/to/file";
$iId = "3"; // Set the id you're looking for

$aFile = file($sFilePath);

// Loop through the array
foreach($aFile as $Key=>$Value) {

// explode the line into another array - use the trim function to strip the newlines
$aRow = explode("|", trim($Value));

if($aRow[0] == $iId) {

    // If the id is the same as the Row ID, set it to the result var
    $sResult = $aRow[1];
    break; // Break out of the foreach loop
}
}

alvinshaffer

Where do you define $Key and $value ?

Natty_Dreadlock

it's defined in the foreach loop => every key-value pair of the array (hashtable) is processed by that loop, so if u have some array e.g. array("test1" => "hello", "test2" => "world", "test3" => "!") and u perform this foreach loop:

foreach($myArray as $key => $value)
{
echo $key . "is " . $value . "\n";
}

U get something like this as the output:
test1 is hello
test2 is world
test3 is !
U got the point?!

alvinshaffer

got it.

Thanks again.