Question

I am having a few issues in doing something that I am sure is quite simple.

I have had a look for many hours on Google and stackoverflow but I can’t seem to find an answer. What I did find that was similar I tried to modify, but unfortunately without success.

I have a text file (names.txt) that contains values similar to this:

Jim|Bob|Keith|Fred|Steve<br>

I need a script that I can run every minute to change the content of the file to store the values in the same format but alphabetically:

Bob|Fred|Jim|Keith|Steve<br>

then display them in an html dropdown box as options.

Any assistance would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Answer 1

You could try this:

$fileName = 'names.txt';
$data     = file_get_contents($fileName);

// Assuming that the file had the data in one line...

// Split the data using the delimiter
$split = explode("|", $data);

// Sort
sort($split);

// Put it all back together
$data = implode("|", $split);

// Store it back in the file
file_put_contents($fileName, $data);