Reading a file not line by line

[Zeradin]

I have a form that writes into a text file: title, date, time, message and poster
the problem is that they are all single line items except message, which can be multiline. Everytime someone puts a return it messes up the whole read. Is there a way to read to some special character so I can just write to the text file and end every item with that character, therefore negating the whole problem? Thanks.

Also is there a simple solution to the fact that my forms post a \ when they get a ' ? I can see that I can turn off the magic quotes or whatever, but will that mess up my code?

[bradgrafelman]

Zeradin wrote:

I can see that I can turn off the magic quotes or whatever, but will that mess up my code?

Well, that depends. First off, you should definitely disable magic quotes as it's been deprecated (and possibly removed from PHP6, don't recall for sure though). As to whether it will "mess up your code", well that's going to have to be something you test for. If you coded your applications for portability, then no. For example, most of my scripts dealing with SQL queries would work regardless of that directive because of coding like this:

if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    $var1 = mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($_POST['var1']));
    // etc.
} else {
    $var = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['var1']);
    // etc.
}

Again, though, this directive was deprecated and you should drop it in favor of good coding practices instead.

As for your problem, you could either replace line breaks with literal "\n" sequences and replace them when you retrieve the data, or you could use something like [man]SQLite[/man] (or simply move to a SQL database) to handle writing to the files.

[Zeradin]

Thanks. You're one of the more useful people ever... I'll go work some more. =)

Only been doing php for a week or so... guess I should learn so SQL.