More form processing...

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

I want to make a basic link directory taht fits very easily into my current design (www.kaziaz.com).

What I want is this:

Someone fills out a form Putting in this:

URL (text field)
Their Name (text field)
Description (text area)
Category (drop-down menu)

If for example they put this in:
URL = www.google.com
Their Name = Bob
Description = A cool SE.
Category = General

Then In A File called "general.txt" a new line is generated which contains the Url their name and the description.

Then back on the directory there would be a link to the General Category and in there would be a list of the links in the general.txt file with the submitters name and Descrition beneath...

Is that possible?
Or am I gonna have to use a database?

Python · September 2004

no it is possible.

if your going to write to a text file you will need to take a look at the fopen and fwrite functions

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

Hmmm... If someone knows of a tutorial that does something very similar to what I want can you give me an url please?
Or maybe you just want to code it for me?

daboss · September 2004

You'll be very very much better off using a database table for this.

A text file will not be able to support you site if your users increase. If you have 1 text file per category, you'll have a big headache maintaining so many text files. If you have 1 text file for all the categories, you'll have a very inefficient and complex script. The 1 text file design will also not be able to cater for multi-access.

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

Firstly, I only intend to ahve say 5/6 categories and secondly, I do not like databases. Using Access just as it is I get along fine. It's easy...
But using MySQL on my server? No chance! lol

Anyway... I tried to have a go myself and this is what I did:

I made an "Add" page which looked like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Test jtgtnjtngjtn</title>
</head>
<body>
<form  action="phptest1.php" method="post">

<input type="text" name="cat" value="1.txt" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="name" value="Bobby" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="url" value="www.url.com" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="site" value="URL .com" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="desc" value="This is the description of the site... Its really good! Go there now!!!!" size="200" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />

</form>
</body>
</html>

I made a php page to process the info in the form:

<?php
$filename=$cat
$file=fopen($filename,"a");
fwrite($file, "<table border="1px" cellpadding="2px" cellspacing="0px" width="400px" style="text-align:left;position:relative;margin:0px auto;width:auto;height:auto"><tr style="background-color:#DDEEFF;"><td width="200">Submitted by $name: </td><td width="200"><a href="$url" target="_blank">$site</a></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">$desc</td></tr></table><br /> \n");
fclose($file);
?>

I also made a file called 1.txt which is where the stuff whould be written to.

The error I get is:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/matsim68/public_html/tests/phptest1.php on line 2

Can anyone tell me what I ahve done wrong... Or if its quicker, maybe you could tell me what I did right? lol.

Thanks in advance!

Forge · September 2004

For this, make sure you have all of the .txt files for the categorys.

have the input fields you have, and just have a pretty basic php script to right to the .txt

<form  action="phptest1.php" method="post">

Site Category:<br>
<select name="cat">
  <option value="general.txt">General</option>
</select>
<br />
<input type="text" name="name" value="Bobby" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="url" value="www.url.com" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="site" value="URL .com" size="50" />
<br />
<input type="text" name="desc" value="This is the description of the site... Its really good! Go there now!!!!" size="200" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />

</form>

This is going to be the HTML form to gather the info. Now we need a pretty basic PHP script to gather this information...

<?php

$file = $cat;

$fp = fopen($file, "a");

if($fp){
fwrite($fp, "<tr><td>Submitted by $name: </td><td width="200"><a href="$url" target="_blank">$site</a></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">$desc</td></tr></table><br /> \n");
fclose($file);
}
else {
echo "Could not open the file named \"$cat\" Please try again";
}

?>

This opens the file, and if it cant, use the if and else statements, if it can, write to the file, and then close it. You can edit this, just dont change much to it...

cptnwinky · September 2004

heres my stab at it...

<form name="form1" method="POST" action="test.php">
  <select name="category">
    <option value="General" selected>General</option>
  </select>
  <br>
  Name:
  <input type="text" name="name" size="50" />
  <br />
  URL: 
  <input type="text" name="url" size="50" />
  <br />
  Site: 
  <input type="text" name="site" size="50" />
  <br>
  Site Description: 
  <br>
  <textarea name="desc" cols="46" wrap="VIRTUAL" id="desc"></textarea>
  <br>
  <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit">
</form>

[php]
$file = 'links.txt';
$cat = $_POST;
$name = $_POST;
$url = $_POST;
$site = $_POST;
$desc = $_POST;

if($_POST) {
if(!file_exists($file) || !is_writable($file)) {
echo 'Make sure the file '.$file.' is writable by the server and does exist.';
}else{
$string = "$cat\t";
$string .= "$name\t";
$string .= "$url\t";
$string .= "$site\t";
$string .= "$desc\n";

$fp = fopen($file,'a');
fputs($fp,$string);
fclose($fp);
echo 'done...';
echo $string.' Written succesfully.';
}
}
[/php]

Now thats a rather simplistic script. In order to handle more than one person accessing the file at one time look into the flock function.

daboss · September 2004

CBG, I'd suggest again that you change the approach. Files are not meant for purposes like this.

cptnwinky · September 2004

Actually, in web scripting this is exactly what files are for. When you only have a few users using something like this then using a db like mysql just makes no sense, especially since he does not already have it running on his server. With only a few users the filesystem will be faster and take less space on the server.

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

Thanks soo much for the help guys, but what's wrong with the script I have?

cptnwinky · September 2004

Well first the error you got was because you forgot a ; on line 1. Second you should always code your scripts as though register globals is off. Soon it will be deprecated completely and you will be forced to change. By this I mean that you should not use $cat instead use $_POST. Third, I wrote the string to the file in a tab delimeted format to ease the use of information later on. This way when you want to display results from the file you can read each line into an array using the explode() function. Or you can even import it into excel if you wanted to.

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

Okay... I can see that I need to add an ; and I kinda get that I need to use $_POST['cat' not $cat... but the rest just flew way over.

You changed the line that is written to the txt file by putting tabs in so that If I want, I can display each bit of info seperately by using a fuction called explode?

CannonBallGuy · September 2004

Sorry.... I guess you all missed this...
Can anyone explain the tabs and explode () thing?

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