[Resolved] About writing to file from form....

[Maggan]

So, in the past months or so I've altered scripts I've found, read tutorials, designed my very own scripts etc, etc with the purpose of writing to file(s) and being able to retrieve those... I've made a couple of scripts I'm pretty proud of.

The thing is, and one would think the answer to this was really quite simple, I can't for the world of me figure out how to decide in what order the form entries should be written to the file.

This should be really quite simple, but not for me. Does anyone want to help a PHP challenged girl figure this out?

The script examples I have around are really, really long so I'd rather not post them in their entire state here, but picture a php written guestbook, that writes to a txt file. What I want is for the newest entry to go on top in the txt file... Could anyone list the possible ways of doing that?

Thanks :-D

[LordShryku]

You just specify your option where to place the pointer when using [man]fopen[/man] Like, r+ opens the file for reading and writing, placing the pointer at the beginning of the file.

[ednark]

I can't for the world of me figure out how to decide in what order the form entries should be written to the file.

Here is the trick i've seen... for instance if you play with the Microsoft Address Book.. you can save your addresses as a Comma Seperated Text File... here is in general how it is done.

the first line of the file you save has the order of the form items... so the order is irrelevant... the procedure for saving retrieving is

0) in php get form data you want to store into an array

$data_to_store = array( 'name'=>'ednark', 'address' => 'home', 'phone'=>'8675309' )

1) open your data file

2) read in first line

BEGIN_FILE
 name, address, phone
END_FILE

3) seperate line into form entry names

  $order = array( 'name', 'address', 'phone )

4) in the order you pull the first line items out write a new line to the file...

  $newline = ''
  foreach ( $order as $key ) { 
      $new_line = $data_to_store[$key] .', ';
  }
  write_to_file($newline);

5) so you end up with

BEGIN_FILE
 name, address, phone
 ednark, home, 8675309
END_FILE

So in this manner... the storage order of each file is dictated by the storage file itself... and the code which uses is general enough to be used accross several projects..

hope this helps

[Maggan]

Originally posted by LordShryku
You just specify your option where to place the pointer when using [man]fopen[/man] Like, r+ opens the file for reading and writing, placing the pointer at the beginning of the file.

::sheepish:: See, I use fopen() several places and I couldn't figure out since I thought I had written r or r+ all over the place... Only I hadn't I had written a+ in that particular crucial place. But now I remember why too. Over in the PHP manual it's specified that a+ and x+ CREATES the file if it's not there... Of course x+ will cause failure if the file's already there. kinda something I'm partially dependant on is for the file to be created if it's not there... but, I think I can manage..

Thanks. I shall perhaps seize pulling out my hair now.

[LordShryku]

If you're depending on the file to be created if it's not there, a simple check beforehand would tell you....

if(!is_file("/path/to/file")) {
   // file doesn't exist, so create it
   touch("/path/to/file");
}

[Maggan]

Thanks! Yeah, that looks simpler than what I thought of. Of course, now it'll still remain to be seen if I can actually incorporate that if statement approperiately

[LordShryku]

If not, just post back. We'll help ya out 🙂