[Resolved] writing to a certain part of a file

[squimmy]

hello,

my question is , is it possible to write to a certain point of a file. like 80 characters in ,and then start writing to the file instead of either at the beggining or the end??any help appreciated. thx

[devinemke]

no. grab the entire contents using [man]file_get_contents[/man] or [man]file[/man], alter the data any way you want, then write it all back to the file using [man]fwrite[/man] (or [man]file_put_contents[/man] if you have PHP 5).

[squimmy]

yes, but i still need to be able to write to this script NOT at the beggining. how can i do that becauese i thought fwrite writes to the beggining.

[devinemke]

Originally posted by squimmy
yes, but i still need to be able to write to this script NOT at the beggining. how can i do that becauese i thought fwrite writes to the beggining.

as i said, grab the entire contents of the file as a string, make changes to that string (which may include adding new data in the middle of the string), then write the entire contents of the string back to the begining of the file (thus overwriting what was there). make sense?

this whole scenario would be very cumbersome with very lage files. if you are dealing with massive amounts of data then you should consider storing your data in a database rather than a flat file.

[drew010]

here is an example.

$text = file_get_contents("./file.txt");

$insert = "somestring\ngoes\nhere\n";

$text = substr($text, 0, 80) . $insert . substr($text, 81);

$fp = fopen("./file.txt", "w+");
fwrite($fp, $text);
fclose($fp);

use substr to capture part of a string. "insert" your new data into whatever part you want. you can use fseek to move the file pointer when you use fopen, but if you write to a file before its end, it will overwrite the data, not move it. much like typing on your computer with the insert key turned on.

[squimmy]

thank you🙂