Sure, but you don't give enough of what you need to fill in with what to do.

    oh, well i want the inital value of <textarea> to be the contents of links.txt (which is in the same dir as the page with the textarea). I wouldhave said that in the first place but i thought it was going to be a big complicated thing lol..

      $handle = fopen("FILENAME","r");

      read file data to variable .. look all this up at php.net, real easy.

      echo "<input ...blah.blah.blah.... vlaue=" . $filecontentfromabove ..blah.blah.blah.... finish input tag";

      fclose($handle);

        Ofcourse you're getting an error. You can't just put <input input="textarea" value="$contents"> in the middle of a php block without printing it out or doing something with it. You should try to fix trivial errors like this by yourself instead of just posting every time you have the slightest complication.

          yeah i just realized that , thats why i deleted my last post just before you said that...

          heres the script now:

          <?php
// get contents of a file into a string
$filename = "shouts.txt";
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
echo "<input input="textarea" value="$contents">";
fclose($handle)
?>

          and now i get this error:

          Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ',' or ';'

            RESOLVED

            Had to add backslashes before all the quotes in the echo statement:

            echo "<input input=\"textarea\" value=\"$contents\">";

            THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP

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