PHP and File Permissions

[Anon]

I'm new to both PHP and being a webmaster so hopefully this is a stupid question with an easy answer.

I've been teaching myself PHP for a couple of days now and I just wrote a form processing script for my website. The problem is, I can't get the script to write to a file unless I grant that file write permissions to others than myself (something I obviously don't want to do). I've tried changing permissions for the file I want to write to within the form processing script but that raises an error. How can I solve this problem?

[brandonschnell]

1) run a copy of apache that no one else uses and has read & write access to the file (file has the same owner as apache)

2) use a database. but that has its own set of issues.