My first project..

johnyelvis

Hello all...

I'm just looking for some guidance on starting my first php/mysql project. Since I have almost no experience, I was hoping someone could point me to some useful snipets, tutorials, whatever to do the following:

Parse a file and look for the string "say:",

Take everything on the line to the right of "say:" and insert it into a mysql table.

So, where do I start??

Thanks in advance everybody!

ATLien

check www.hotscripts.com

cgraz

the best way is just think of something you want to build, and start building it. When you run into any problems or don't know how to do a certain part, search online or post here for help. You'll learn much more that way then just following a tutorial.

Just dive in and you'll learn a lot quicker. Worked really well for me.

Cgraz

johnyelvis

Thanks for the replies guys, to be honest I didn't really expect any from such a lame question.. Nice to know there are a couple of smarties on the internet who are actually nice 🙂

I actually jumped into my project with Sam's PHP/MySQL book at my side and have made a little (a very little) progress.

I used file() to read the file, but I think that might be the wrong approach in this case (live and learn) since I need to use the strstr() to delete all lines that don't contain the word "say" . Once I figure out how to make each line a string I think I'll be better off.

I'm sure my first 50 projects (if I hang in there that long) will be full of sloppy code, but I'll figure it out eventually. If not, I'll figure out a way to parse this log with an sh script using grep and then just use php to echo a random line from the resulting file.

Thanks again for the friendly posts guys. Much Appreciated!

cgraz

file() reads the file into an array. That means you can access each line by $array["x"] where x represents the line number.

Keep in mind arrays start counting at zero. So if you want to access line 20, you'd need to do

// load the file into an array
$array = file("/path/file.txt");

// echo line 20 (just an example)
echo $array["19"];

If you want to replace a certain word, just loop through the array line by line using a for loop

for($i=0; $i<count($array); $i++) {
   // do whatever here. Access the line using $array[$i]
   // $i will represent the line number, so the for loop is dynamic
}

Cgraz