[RESOLVED] Writing to a .txt file - new line symbol ?

davidmorley

I am writing a series of entries, each one about 60 characters long, into a .txt file in a folder on the web site.

$myfile = fopen("Foldername/Sheetname.txt", "a") or die ("Unable to open file!");
fwrite($myfile, $final_string);
fclose($myfile);

When I come to look at the sheet, say using FTP, all the entries follow each other on one line and therefore rather difficult to look at and handle.

I'd like to have each entry on a new line but I'm not sure how to arrange this. Initial fiddlings failed. How to do this, please ?

NogDog

Assuming just a simple newline character (as opposed to Windows' carriage-return/newline sequence), the simple change would be:

fwrite($myfile, $final_string."\n"); // must be double-quotes

If you really need it to be Windows CR/NL, then

fwrite($myfile, $final_string."\r\n"); // must be double-quotes

NogDog

PS: if you can't be sure if the text will already have a newline or not,

fwrite($myfile, trim($final_string)."\n");

davidmorley

OK. Working now. Thank you.

laserlight

It may be worthwhile to consider the PHP manual's two notes on fopen:

For portability, it is strongly recommended that you always use the 'b' flag when opening files with fopen().

Again, for portability, it is also strongly recommended that you re-write code that uses or relies upon the 't' mode so that it uses the correct line endings and 'b' mode instead.

That is, the recommendation is to always operate as if the file were a binary file, and hence write the line ending based on the target operating system.

dalecosp

Note that the constant PHP_EOL stands for the newline character on $whatever_os_you_are_using:

file_put_contents($my_string . PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND);

NogDog

Although you might not always want to use PHP_EOL, as it may depend on the target consumer of the file you are creating/appending, and what that consuming entity will expect.