Reading from a flat file

[Anon]

I knew just the very basic stuff in PHP, but I would like to know how to read from a flat file generated by a guestbook. My aim was to show the latest entry of the guestbook on another page of my website, and in order to do this I must extract the bottommost entry from a flat file and extract the information necessary. The content of the flat file is like this:

20011115031709||November 15, 2001 - 03:17 AM||alfredo.palconit||[e-mail]||Philippines||i like your site. it\'s smple and neat. i wish mine was better than yours, hehehe||http://alfredo.palconit.com
20011118162340||November 18, 2001 - 04:23 PM||vince||starduimpl||Philippines||Comments >>>this is totally great!!!||http://

WIth my limited knowledge, I was able to create this small script that can extract the last entry of the guestbook which is like this:

<?php
// isingit ang dati han na
$fcontents = file ('whiteliter.dat');
echo $fcontents[count($fcontents)-1];
?>

The result is like this:
20011118162340||November 18, 2001 - 04:23 PM||vince||starduimpl||Philippines||Comments &gt;&gt;&gt;this is totally great!!!||http://

It was successful in retrieving the last entry, but it is not yet formatted. My problem right now, is how can I remove the delimiter and put it on different arrays just like in the guestbook. I only wanted to get the (1) comments, (2) name of the signer linking to his/her (3) email from the last entry of the g-book.

(I tried using the string "explode" but i cant figure it out.)
If you wanted to view my personal homepage with the guestbook the url is http://www.kuwentuhan.com/nothingtodo/

Thanks!

Gilbert

[amcgrath]

Whats there to figure ut with explode()? simply do:

$last_arr = explode("|",$last_line);

Then $last_arr is an array with each element holding the data dound in $last_line:

$last_arr[0] = "20011118162340";
$last_arr[1] = "~~";
$last_arr[2] = 'November 18, 2001 - 04:23 PM";

etc and so on...

[psr540]

Allen is right, in addition, you can use $last_arr = explode('|~~|', $last_line),
now $last_arr[0] = '20011...."
$last_arr[1] = 'November 18, ....";