Sorta A List Alphabetically In Text File

Anon

Hello, long time since I've last posted here, but it's because of you guys that I'm that much better at PHP. Anyhow, here's my question:

For example, say I had a list of peoples first names in a simple TXT file, each on its own line:

Nina
Andrew
Johnathan
Susan
George
Peter

Alison

Is there anyway I can retrieve the list of names from the TXT file (that's pretty easy), but then sort them in alphabetical order and then re-write them back to the TXT file? (So the end result would look like the following🙂

Alison
Andrew
George
Johnathan
Nina
Peter

Susan

Thanks for all the help.

jordan

Ah, a refreshingly simple (but interesting) question. The easiest way to do this is to use file() to read the file into an array, sort() to sort the array, and then fopen() and fwrite() to write it back into the file:

<?
$filename = "file.txt";
$names = file($filename); // read the file into array $names
sort($names); // sort the array

$filehandle = fopen($filename, "w"); // open the file for writing

// write the values of $names to the file
foreach($names as $value) {
    fwrite($filehandle,$value);
}

fclose ($filehandle); // close the file
?>

I hope this is helpful.

Anon

Hey, thanks, that worked perfectly. In case you're wondering what I wanted that for: After sorting the array and writing to the file I used the array to create a select input box so the user could choose a name (it just seemed more relavent if it was in order). Here's the code I used for that:

<?php

// Previous sort code

echo("<select>");
for ($i = 0; $i <= count($names); ++$i) {
echo("<option>$names[$i]</option>\n"); }
echo("</select>");

Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it.