PHP code to clean automatically clean the text file

cchapoval

Hi,

I am using a simple private chat room but I am encountering a problems.

I am using messages.txt - text file instead of database to hold the chat, but I have to manually empty this text file every 2 days otherwise you get error message saying that the file is "full".

How do I create an automatically routine that cleans this text file?
It could be done thru a link that would ask me, do you want to erase all the data inside? Yes or No.

I really appreciate the input.
Tks,Carla

drawmack

Originally posted by cchapoval
Hi,

I am using a simple private chat room but I am encountering a problems.

I am using messages.txt - text file instead of database to hold the chat, but I have to manually empty this text file every 2 days otherwise you get error message saying that the file is "full".

How do I create an automatically routine that cleans this text file?
It could be done thru a link that would ask me, do you want to erase all the data inside? Yes or No.

I really appreciate the input.
Tks,Carla

hmm, I would mark each comment with a unix style timestamp. Then I would have the program that displays the chat window only display messages in the last twenty minutes and when someone submits a new message I would have it create a new file with only messages from the last 20 minutes.

Or you could write a cron that will go in once a day and do this for you. Though I recomend moving to a database of xml instead of a text file.

cchapoval

Thanks "drawmack"

I got an easy solution creating a delete.php file that only do this:

<?php
$fileOpen=@fopen("messages.txt", "w+");
fclose($fileOpen);
header("Location: chat.htm");
?>

and with "w+" erases everything there...

MeShane

I Looked For Ever For This Script!

How To Type In A Thing In A Text Area And it Will Only Delete That Out?

teem

I would add a few lines of code to clean the text file before it became full. So, before a new comment is added, the script checks how full the file is and deletes the oldest existing comment if it needs to (or all of the comments) and then inserts the new one. That way your text file would always be teetering on the edge of being full, but you wouldn't have to manually clear it ever.

Unless of course you are required to delete it every 2 days regardless of how full it really is, in which case my solution obviously wouldn't work!