Flat file help!!! Urgent!!!

[maxsslade]

I am writing a Fantasy Football League table that updates the league table when you put the scores in the 'Goals For' and 'Goals Against' boxes.

I was going to use MySQL to start a database but i am only an amatuer so i am going to use flat text files.

I want to be able to read single lines of text from 1 text file and each variable will be spaced with '|' for example:

Team 1|23|34
Team 2|34|23
Team 3|12|43

if you know what i mean. i need to have each of the chunks of data between before and after the '|' marks to be a variable so i can display and update them as needed. I have looked at a lot of PHP coding to try and work out the logistics of what i am trying to do, i found that this data may need to be in the form of an Array or variable. How would i do this in PHP and could you supply me the code or an example of code for this.

Thankyou,
Your help is greatly appreciated.

Max Slade

[Anon]

$fp = fopen("file.txt", "r");

$items = array();
$i = 0;
while ($line = fgets($fp, 4096)) { // get all text on each line
$items[$i] = explode("|", $line); // make an array out of text separated with |
$i++; // increment array counter
}

Now you will have an array called $items with as many rows as you have lines in your file, and each row will itself be an array of the items found on each line. So using your example:

$items[0] = array("Team 1", "23", "34");
$items[1] = array("Team 2", "34", "23");
$items[2] = array("Team 3", "12", "43");

[maxsslade]

i tried this, but all php writes to the HTML page is 'Array'.

Please tell me why php does this, this is the script i used:

$fp = fopen("include/teamdata1.txt", "r");

$items = array();
$i = 0;
while ($line = fgets($fp, 4096)) { // get all text on each line
$items[$i] = explode("|", $line); // make an array out of text separated with |
$i++; // increment array counter
}
fclose($fp);
echo "$items";

Max Slade

PS. Thanks Rob

[eikyuu]

as you echo only $items it will output array, because that is what it is.
you have to reference the indices of the items to get the value, meaning

echo $items[0]

to get them all try
for($i=0;$i<count($items);$i++)
{
echo $items[$i]."<br>";
}

this should get you all data ...
I'm farely new to php myself, so no promise made, hope it helps anyway

[Anon]

Almost right Anja, but the array I had him Max create is a multi-deminsional array so all your code would get him is:

Array
Array
Array

As many times as he had lines in his file. To print out all of the information held in the array you needed 1 more loop:

for($i=0;$i<count($items);$i++)
{
echo "Row: $i<br>";
for ($x = 0; $x < count($items[$i]); $x++) {
echo $items[$i][$x]."|";
}
echo "<br>";
}

I just added a little formatting to your code so that what was printed out would look a little nicer. That code will output:

Row 1:
Team 1|23|34
Row 2:
Team 2|34|23
Row 3:
Team 3|12|43

I know this looks almost exatly like Max's file, but it doesn't have to he can do what ever he wants with it. Personally Max I'd suggest you look into using a database. While in theory it should be easier to work with flat files it really isn't. The infrastructre to work with flat files easily isn't there.