PHP

Working With Text Files in PHP

Sure, you know PHP's MySQL functions, but do you know how to read/write files in PHP? If not, then make sure you read this article. In it, Mitch teaches you everything you need to know to successfully work with files in PHP...

Author Info:

By: Mitchell Harper

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December 18, 2002

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Working With Text Files in PHP - File Writing in Action
(Page 4 of 5 )

Let's create an example that will grab the name, sex and age of someone from a HTML form and write them to a file. There will be 2 pages in our example: getdata.php and savedata.php.

Here's the code for getdata.php:

<html>
<head>
<title> Personal Organizer </title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff">

<form action="savedata.php" method="post">
First Name: <input type="text" name="first_name" size="30"><br>
Last Name: <input type="text" name="last_name" size="30"><br>
Age: <input type="text" name="age" size="2"><br>
Sex: <input type="radio" name="sex" value="M"> Male <input type="radio" name="sex"

value="F"> Female<br><br>
<input type="submit" value="Save Data >>">
</form>

</body>
</html>

Nothing fancy here. Just a simple HTML form that posts data to a file called savedata.php. The output from the HTML above looks like this:

The output from getdata.php

The savedata.php file will grab these values and save them into a file called organizer.data. Note that I will not be implementing any error checking on the form values -- only on the file operations.

Here's savedata.php:

<?php

$fName = @$_POST["first_name"];
$lName = @$_POST["last_name"];
$age = is_numeric(@$_POST["age"]) ? $_POST["age"] : 0;
$sex = @$_POST["sex"] == "" ? "M" : $_POST["sex"];

// Set the string to be written to the file
$values = "Name: $fName $lName\r\n";
$values .= "Age: $age\r\n";
$values .= "Sex: $sex\r\n";

// Open the file for truncated writing
$fp = @fopen("organizer.data", "w") or die("Couldn't open organizer.data for writing!");
$numBytes = @fwrite($fp, $values) or die("Couldn't write values to file!");

@fclose($fp);
echo "Wrote $numBytes bytes to organizer.data successfully!";

?>

As you can see, I've used our fopen, fwrite and fclose functions with some @ symbols to stop PHP spitting any errors if they occur. If errors do occur, then the die() function will be called and a message output before the script terminates. Alternatively, you could've added

error_reporting(E_NONE);

... to the top of the file to stop any type of error being displayed. Our file, organizer.data now looks like this:

Our organizer.data file