Pls help I need it badly thanks...

[LiberMan]

Hello guys,

I want to learn php, writing all these data instead, to the textfile called employees.txt in the notepad of course. I heard its posible.

Supposing you have a data already in a textfile.txt that contain

MY CLIENTS DATA in employees.txt
ID FIRSTNAME LASTNAME AGE
1 IAN UY 27 delete edit
2 JACKSON LEE 32 delete edit
3 JEAN TY 38 delete edit
4 JAMES HAT 22 delete edit
5 ARMAN CO 20 delete edit

and all i want is to make a php file that would display them all to a table format in view.php for example and of course I can EDIT and DELETE each one of them for example i would like to delete the first line IAN. Thats what exactly i want.

any sample code and right codes pls give me...i am getting crazy about this php is very confusing..but I am not giving up...never...pls help...ty

Pls help that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks..
REPLY ASAP

[eUK-Martin]

I am not a programmer and not good at PHP. However I think you can achieve this with the PHP function file_get_contents();

Example :

 
$contents = file_get_contents('textfile.txt');

Hope some PHP coder will comment on this soon.

[DavidAllen]

PHP Code:

//display the file in a table
echo '<table>';
//first read whole file into an array
$LinesArray = file('path_to_file'.'/textfile.txt');
//loop through each line
for ($i=0;$i<count($LinesArray);$i++) {
//split the line into fields
$FieldsArray=explode(' ',$LinesArray[$i])
echo '<tr>';
for ($j=0;$j<count($FieldsArray);$j++) {
echo '<td>'.rtrim($FieldsArray[$j].'</td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table>'; 


That displays the file in a table

To edit you would need to wrap the whole lot in a form and use input fields
To delete you would need to use a checkbox or something at the end of each line

The processing of the form is a bit more complicated - but I hope the above helps for a start

PS - In the long run I think you would probably be better keeping the data in a database as that will give you much better flexibility (and security).

Regards

[eUK-Martin]

Wow David that was a very quick and short script. Just Great.

[mephisto]

It's not exactly a simple job, but the best functions to use would probably be fgetcsv and fputcsv. You'll need to ignore the header of the file and then read the file into an array, and provide edit buttons to identify where in the file the row is located. This is a very quick 'n' dirty example, no security or file locking here.

PHP Code:

<?php
    $file = 'employees.txt'; // make sure this points to your file

    if(count($_POST) > 0) {
        $rows = array();
        $rows[] = array( // add header row
            'ID',
            'FIRSTNAME',
            'LASTNAME',
            'AGE'
        );
        // read in new structure
        
        $size = count($_POST['ID']);
        for($i = 0; $i < $size; $i++) {
            if(!isset($_POST['delete' . $i])) { // we don't want deleted entries                
                $rows[] = array(
                    $_POST['ID'][$i],
                    $_POST['firstname'][$i],
                    $_POST['lastname'][$i],
                    $_POST['age'][$i]
                );
            }
        }
        
        $fp = fopen($file, 'w'); // open the file for writing, truncate to zero length
        foreach($rows as $row) {
            fputcsv($fp, $row, ' '); // write each row
        }
        fclose($fp);
    }
    
    // open a file pointer as read only
    $fp = fopen($file, 'r');
    $rows = array();
    // ignore header
    fgets($fp);
    while(!feof($fp)) {
        $rows[] = fgetcsv($fp, 0, ' '); // last parameter is delimter
    }
    $html = <<< EOH
<form method="post">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>ID</th>
            <th>Firstname</th>
            <th>Lastname</th>
            <th>Age</th>
            <th colspan="2"></th>
        </tr>
EOH;
    foreach($rows as $key => $row) {
        $html .= <<< EOH
        <tr>
            <td>
                <input type="hidden" name="row[]" value="{$key}"/>
                <input type="text" name="ID[]" value="{$row[0]}"/>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="firstname[]" value="{$row[1]}"/>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="lastname[]" value="{$row[2]}"/>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="age[]" value="{$row[3]}"/>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="submit" name="delete{$key}" value="delete"/>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="submit" name="edit{$key}" value="edit"/>
            </td>
        </tr>
EOH;
    }
    
    fclose($fp);
    
    $html .= "</table></form>";
    
    echo $html;
?>

I've not test the above, as I don't have anything to run it on available to me at the moment, but I think it should work.

[mephisto]

Originally Posted by DavidAllen

PS - In the long run I think you would probably be better keeping the data in a database as that will give you much better flexibility (and security).

I agree, it would be must better to use a database. You could also use ajax to edit/delete each row, then a form wouldn't actually be needed, but that's on a whole another level.