reading, sorting and displaying data

[desideriomurcho]

Dear all

I am using a nice php counter to all 600+ pages of my website. It counts different hits for different pages. The counter outputs to a TXT file, line by line like this:

/lds_fil10b.html:0000000000000001
/fa_1.html:0000000000000017
/fil_tresteoriasdaarte.html:0000000000000146

Each line has the path and file name and after the : the hits for that page. Nice. I would like a script to:

1) Read the txt file line by line and order it descendently by hits;
2) Read the first, say, 30 pages (top 30), and read the <title> of those pages;
3) Delete a common string that all titles have (the name of the site), so that it would only display the title of the page;
4) Output the top 30 page titles with their hits in front.

So the idea is to have a live dinamic page in my site with the top 30 hits.

As I understand the logic of this, this should be quite easy for an experienced programer. Alas, I am not that guy. I write HTML and can parse simples PHP scripts and adapt them, but that is it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!!

Best,

Desi

[Norman_Graham]

Hi Desi

I'm not sure how you would go about this. I can only comment that the task would be a hell of a lot easier if the info were in a database. The reason for this is that a database offers a multitude of built-in sorting and ordering commands.

Norm

[desideriomurcho]

Thanks, Norm. The problem is that I do not have a database in my server. Somehow I did think this would be trivial for an experienced PHP coder. Silly of me... Thanks anyway!

Desi

[desideriomurcho]

BTW, what if I feed the flat file already sorted? That is easy for me to do manualy...

[Weedpacket]

Well, yes, it would be pretty trivial, but a proper database would be easier and significantly faster. It's not like they're expensive...

Your description pretty much describes what you'll want your program to do:

1. Read the file ([man]file[/man] would do this adequately)

2. Sort the file ([man]usort[/man] is your friend here)

3. Pick the top thirty (using [man]array_slice[/man] can do this even if there aren't thirty lines in the page)

4. You probably want to format them. A whole pile of functions for working with [man]strings[/man] exists for this, such as [man]explode[/man] and [man]trim[/man] (in fact, those might be all you need - oh, maybe [man]str_replace[/man])

5. Now that you've got the data you can output them in whichever way turns you on the most.

[desideriomurcho]

Great, Thanks, Weedpacket! Hands on, now...