Question

I have a one-to-one key structure of zip codes to user located in a .html that looks like…

...
'80135': 'user1',
'80136': 'user1',
'80137': '',
'80138': '',
'80202': 'user2',
'80203': 'user2',
'80204': '',
'80205': '',
'80206': '',
'80207': '',
...

I would like to take a bulk list zip codes for user3 and fill in or over-write old user. So for example if I have for user3, zip codes (80202,80203,80204) then my previous block of code would change to…

...
'80135': 'user1',
'80136': 'user1',
'80137': '',
'80138': '',
'80202': 'user3',
'80203': 'user3',
'80204': 'user3',
'80205': '',
'80206': '',
'80207': '',
...

The reason for text editor is to complete my set now, but ideally it would be nice to have a client application that our non-programmer team can update and make changes as they please, so a script for this would be nice for future plans.
I am passing the content into my site via…

var list_load = {<?php include_once('list.html'); ?>};

Because I believe some might have an alternate idea on storage of this information, this list is very long, 35,000 lines of code, so any ideas on completely changing my code consider a process to migrate data.

Answer 1

Based on the information you provided I’m going to assume your example code is a subset of a JSON object. I’m also going to assume that you only have a one-to-one relationship of zip-codes to users in your object given that you did not explicitly state otherwise and given that the existing object structure would not allow for one-to-many relationship. Given all these assumptions the solution to your immediate problem is to load the JSON into PHP, make your changes there, and then overwrite the entire file with the updated JSON object.

$json = file_get_contents('list.html');
$array = json_decode($json, true);

$oldUser = 'user2';
$newUser = 'user3';
$listZipCodes = array("80204"); // list of zip codes to update

// Update the JSON based on user ...
foreach ($array as $zipCode => $user) {
    if ($user === $oldUser) {
        $array[$zipCode] = $newUser;
    }
}

// Update the JSON based on zip code ...
foreach (array_keys($array) as $zipCode) {
    if (in_array($zipCode, $listZipCodes)) {
        $array[$zipCode] = $newUser;
    }
}

$json = json_encode($array);

file_put_contents('list.html', $json);

Again, this is all assuming that list.html looks like this…

{
    "80135": "user1",
    "80136": "user1",
    "80137": "",
    "80138": "",
    "80202": "user2",
    "80203": "user2",
    "80204": "",
    "80205": "",
    "80206": "",
    "80207": ""
}

Remember it has to be valid a valid JSON object notation in your list.html in order for PHP to be able to parse it correctly. Your existing example is not going to work in PHP because you’re using single quotes instead of double quotes, which is a requirement of the JSON spec. So you have to make sure that part is valid in your list.html file.

Beyond that I highly discourage you to take this approach, because it causes a number of serious problems that can’t easily be solved. For example, you can not ensure your data won’t be corrupted using this approach as anyone two PHP scripts may attempt to overwrite the file at the same time (no data integrity). Also, you can’t easily make this scale without it costing you a lot of unnecessary CPU and memory problems if the list gets large enough. Additionally, you have no way to control who may edit the file directly and thus no way to control data flow to the underlying application code that tries to use that data.

A better solution is to use a database and that way you can both control the data and its user privileges, plus you can provide a front-end for non-programmers to edit/modify/read the data through your front-end, via PHP.