mysql help for newbie

Anon

I have this form located at newdreamdesigns.com/php/signup.php3?id=webcounter

I would like the script to create an account in mysql when the user submits the form.

The username is created by the script and is numbers only. 10 digits 0000000001. When a user signs up, it goes up one so the next person would get 0000000002.

How can I do this with my php3 script.

Also, as for mysql. I have a database called ndd_webcounter.

How can I store each user registration in the databse.

Please explain to me how to do this.

Anon

Ok the easiest way to do this would be to actualy use the value of the userid as the primary column with auto_increment turned on. You'd set that up with MySQL by creating a table column with values similar to this one.

userid int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key

What this then means is that everytime you create an entry the database will automaticly increment this value up by 1, this is how I maintain all my own user database systems as well as things like news posts and challenge entries, everything is referenced by numbers like these.

Anon

Is it possible to write data into a file besides MySQL and still be able to update/write/delete sections of a file?

I heard that text files are not good to store data for a lot of people and that if a user edits his information, it would have to be re-written to the bottom of the script.

Is there something else that is easier but can store data in a file.

Anon

Well yeh, of course it's posible, but it takes a bunch of extra coding and it can get kinda sluggish if the file gets large. You could always try to create a php implementation of the standard Win32 ini file handlers as their easy to edit by hand and quite easy to parse, thou again it does take quite a bit of execution time because the file would have to be reloaded into memory and parsed into a data structure each time the script were to execute. If your interested in that methood do a search of the forums, I posted some code a while back on the subject, I'd repost it but it'd just be a waste of space if you didn't want to use it.

Anon

I'm running on a UNIX server with PHP3.

My userfile will be like this

and so one, each taking up one line

If you dont' want to repost it, send it to markmh84@hotmail.com

I just want the user to be able to edit the account and keep the information on the same line instead of it going into a temp file and then printed back to the main file at the bottom.

USERNAME is automatically created by the php script so that the first user who signs up gets 0001 and the second gets 0002 and so on... So I want the list in order

0001
0002
0003

etc...

Thanks in advance!

Anon

Ok, well I'm happy to post the script but I still don't see why you really want to use a text file to keep track of it all, are you needing it in this format for compatibility with some other program?

Don't worry, I'm still gonna post the code, it's on my other system, I'll toss it up here tonight sometime.