Deleting area in text file

[Ganlek]

Here is what I wanna do. I have an html file for news that I pull into my content area. here is a sample of the news file

<h2>Title</h2>
<p>News text</p>

<h4>Title</h2>
<p>News text</p>

<a href="">Link here</a>

I have coded a form that will add new news to the top of this file. It can have a couple paragraphs, an image file and link under the <h></h>'s and a possible link at the bottom, with a blank line with the next news undernieth.

What I would like to do is code a way to move a block of news (say after 7 blocks of news are in the file) to an archive file for the month.

I was thinking I could count the number of <h></h>'s in the file, and if there are more than 7, then take the last block of news and move it. I just dont know how to go about that.

Any Ideas? I dont have MySQL or a database at the moment. It has to be pure PHP and text.

Thanks in advance

[maxpup979]

what I would probably do is add a delimeter comment into the HTML. So when it is time to remove a story, you can open the file, explode it into an array, loop across the array to rewrite the file. This should give you the level of control you need to pull out the specific articles. as a plus, you already have the data you need in memory to write it to the archive.

[Ganlek]

I was thinking the same thing. However, for the life of me I cant think of what I need to do to be able to say "this story is the 8th one, delete it off the list and store it".

I know how to explode a file into an array and such, its just getting the area in between that deliminator and putting it into a variable or something.

Do you have an example I can look at? I am a learn by example guy.

[maxpup979]

Lets assume you have already read the contents of the file into a variable $contents.
Lets also assume that between each story you put the comment: <!--Delimiter-->
So then you could:
$stories=explode("<!--Delimiter-->",$contents);

At this point, each story (and the extra stuff at the end) is stored in the array $stories (one story per key).

So then you can loop across the array:

for($x=0;$x<count($stories);$x++){
  if($x==8){
  #this is the 8th story--I want to archive it.
   $storytoarchive=$stories[$x];
  }else{
  #this is either story 1-7, or the end bits
    fwrite($handle,$stories[$x]."\n");
  }
}

#add $storytoarchive at this point

[Ganlek]

AHA... I understand now. I dunno why, but I couldnt think how this worked. I think I was trying to make it more complex than it is. lol

Its like a lightbulb just went on. Thank you much!!