Building my Own CMS (Array Problems)

[Jonny___Gut]

I am writing a news content management system where the files HAVE to be named like this

news1.txt
news2.txt
news3.txt
[...]
news7.txt
etc, etc

The number is very important as that's how the flash works (and reads in the correct news count, etc). So far, I have got the admin system to work in the following fashion

Step 1
Read in the contents of the directory, load the files into an array that looks like this
$newsArray[1][title] = "Article 1's Title"
$newsArray[1][content] = "Article 1's Content"
$newsArray[2][title] = "Article 2's Title"
$newsArray[2][content] = "Article 2's Content"
etc, etc

Step 2
The user can manipulate the array by moving "articles" up and down the stack (whereby it changes the Array KEY and renumbers the rest accordingly). Likewise the user can also edit the contents of any array item (eg: the title and contents of $newsArray[2])

Step 3
The array is written back to disk as text files (eg: $newsArray[1] => news1.txt, $newsArray[2] => news2.txt, etc, etc)

This is all fine, and works great for creating new articles, moving articles around and editing existing articles, but I can't for the life of me work out how to delete an article!!

Logic would dictate that I could shove the offending article ($newsArray[$delThisOne]) to the end of the array and then array_pop() it off the end - but I'm not sure this is the best approach.

Do you have any ideas on this matter?

Thanks in advance
jonny.

[devinemke]

first off all, my stock answer whenever i see someone using text files this way is to say: use a database. don't reinvent the wheel. don't use text files as a database, use a database instead. trust me.

as to your exact problem:
to delete array indexes use [man]unset[/man]
to delete files from the filesystem use [man]unlink[/man]

[JonnyReeves]

Hmm, that's odd - I can't log in using my user account I created above, prolly due to the @ symbol...

Like I said, I need to use text files, besides, there are only going to ever be 20 of these files, max - if I wanted to use a dB, I would 😉

I'm thinking that the best way of doing it would be to search the array for the key that I want to delete, null it, and then write out the remaining values to a new, temporary array, which in turn becomes the original array.

Still, I'm open to other ideas - maybe a temporary dB that output the changes to the txt files when the users clicks "confirm all changes" or somethign similar...