Question

I have a php function I’ve written that sorts player’s fastest race times. However, it’s very dirty, me being a beginning php programmer. I want to know how I could write this much simpler so that only 1 file read is being done:

function write_scores($name, $time)
{
    $racetimes = "/home/duke/aa/servers/demo/var/logs/racetimes.txt"; //temporary file
    $test = "/home/duke/aa/servers/demo/var/logs/test.txt"; //sorted file
    $fh = fopen($racetimes, 'a');
    $lines = file($racetimes);
        fwrite($fh, "$time, $name\n");
    natsort($lines);
    $lines = array_slice ( $lines , 0, 5); //only store 100 scores to speed performance although $racetimes is the one that needs trimming...
    file_put_contents($test, implode("", $lines));
}

I’ve tried removing the racetimes reference, but then nothing gets written. I can’t wrap my brain around it. How can this be rewritten so that it only uses 1 file call?

Answer 1

That looks a bit weird, writing the file you’re reading. You’d do better to just add the time to the in-memory array, then you could write it out with the other sorted scores.

I took the liberty of removing $test from the function. I’m assuming the goal is to maintain one sorted list of scores. If you really want two, re-add all the references to $test.

function write_scores($name, $time)
{
    $racetimes = "/home/duke/aa/servers/demo/var/logs/racetimes.txt";
    $lines = file($racetimes);
    $lines[] = "$time, $name\n";
    natsort($lines);
    if (count($lines) > 100) array_splice($lines, 100);
    file_put_contents($racetimes, $lines);
}