php? yeah php??? indeed (input file help)

EscapeEagle

I'm completly new to php and i know ecco, thats about it. I'm very familiar with coding languages C, C++, and Java. I know a fair deal of HTML, mostly design html.

I understand a lot of the code for php since a lot of it is the same as other languages such as control statments, methods ect.

Basically what i'm trying to do is read in values for variables from a txt file. To do this on a webpage, everything is telling me php.

So how would i go about reading say 10 values and storing them into an array? After i have the values, its just a matter of displaying them into a table which is the easy part lol.

LordShryku

[man]file[/man]

TheDefender

OK, let's say you have a file called file.txt and the contents are as follows:

John
Mary
Sam
Mike
Dave

The following code will pull

$lines = file('http://www.domain.com/file.txt');
print_r($lines);

This will output:

array([0] => John, [1] => Mary, [2] => Sam, [3] => Mike, [4] => Dave)

The file function grabs the lines, and puts them into an array for you.

If your file looks more like this:
John,Mary,Sam,Mike,Dave

Then you'd need to do something more like this (which gives the same output):

$handle = file_get_contents("http://www.domain.com/file.txt", "rb"); // Need the b if on a Windows machine
$array = explode(",", $handle);
print_r($array);

LordShryku

Actually, fopen only opens the file. It doesn't do any reading. The best bet in that situation IMO would be [man]file_get_contents[/man].

EscapeEagle

Thanks you two,

Defender, my list is indeed in the format of your first example (one value per line). After using your code, is the values of the lines in an array? It looks as though $lines holds all the values together but not in an array?.

Edit: sorry lord, didnt see you. I looked at the file_get_contents method and it looks like it reads everything into one variable too? my aim is to read each line into a different position of an array.

Array[0] = line1 of input file
Array[1] = line2 of input file

TheDefender

Lord, you are right... file_get_contents is the one I was looking for for putting the entire contents into a string... (Code above has been edited)

EscapeEagle, the file() function puts each line into the array as a separate value... so since my first exmple is what you are going to have, then the file() function is the one you want. It does exactly what you want it to do... Just change my code to get your file, and check out the print_r($array); line's output... You'll see.