Question

I have a page with a WYSIWYG editor the user can use. After editing, they can press a button, and the javascript should POST the current page to a save.php file and refresh the page with new information.

There are two problems. The first is that initially the page doesn’t load with the updated file. The user has to refresh the page to see it updated (maybe it just takes an extra second to write the file?). The second problem, is that after the first time the temporary file was created, it cannot be overwritten, so the page never updates after the first refresh. Here are the snippets I’m working with:

Javascript function on the WYSIWYG editor page (editor.php):

function refresh(html,username,info)
{
    $.post("save.php", { html: html, username: username } );
    window.location = 'editor.php?info=' + info;
}

save.php file

$html = $_POST['html'];
$username = $_POST['username']; 
file_put_contents('temp/' . $username . '.txt', $html);

Answer 1

As the browser may not have issued the POST request before navigating to the next page, use the success callback from the post to do the relocate:

function refresh(html,username,info) {
  $.post("save.php", { html: html, username: username }, function() {
    window.location = 'editor.php?info=' + info;
  });
}

As other people have already commented, using data directly from a form post without sanitising it is a really bad plan and opens your server up to all kinds of malicious attacks. Have a look at some of these questions: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=sanitize+php

If the data is getting to your server ok, make sure that the access permissions on the directory ‘temp’ allow write access from the web server user (if you have access to SSH to your server, run chmod go+w /path/to/temp, otherwise most FTP programs allow you to set file permissions too).