[RESOLVED] Saving and Finding a string in a file

iNFERiON

Hey all,

I have a little problem with a script I am writing. It's a voting script with a weekly poll. Users can vote once per week. I want it to record the user who voted. I tried this, but it just seems to write the \n part:

// Log who voted
$user = $_SESSION['user'];
$vf = fopen("voted.txt",'a');
fwrite($vf,"$user\n");
fclose($vf);

And I would like to know how I can have my script check if a user voted already. The username is stored in a session string $_SESSION['user']. I tried this but it doesn't seem to do anything at all:

// Voting allowed user logged in, check if already voted
$vc = fopen("voted.txt",'r');
while ($scan = fscanf($vc, $_SESSION['user'])) {
	echo "You already voted.";
	exit;
}

Any suggestions more then welcome 🙂

P.S. I don't have an SQL database available, so please don't come with database solutions, thanks.

wilku

For your first question - the code looks ok - check if $user isn't empty.
For the second qestion, try something like this:

$voted = file_get_contents("voted.txt");
$pos = strpos($voted, $_SESSION['user']);

if ($pos === false) {
   //vote here
} else {
   echo " You have already voted.";
}

iNFERiON

wilku wrote:
For your first question - the code looks ok - check if $user isn't empty.
For the second qestion, try something like this:
$voted = file_get_contents("voted.txt");
$pos = strpos($voted, $_SESSION['user']);

if ($pos === false) {
   //vote here
} else {
   echo " You have already voted.";
}

Excellent, that works great ! Thanks 🙂
As for the first problem, I found what it was, I did a debug and tried this:

$user = $_SESSION['user'];
echo "The user is $user";

and got a null response. Then I notice I had to do this as I used on the other pages :p

if(!session_id()) {
session_start();
}

and now it works perfectly, it now recognizes that the logged in user has voted and will prevent him/her to do so again 😃

Thanks again for your help 🙂