Question

I think i was doing halfway good to get this to halfway work. Anyways the following code works to find it on the first line, but i have a script that creates each on an individual line.
Please revise or create a completely new version of the following to make it to search for the form data on every line.

$search = $_POST['search'];
$file = file("SLIST.txt");
foreach($file as $line) 
{
    $line = trim($line);
    if($line == $search) 
    {
        echo $search . " WAS found in the database";
    }
    else 
    {
        echo $search . " was NOT found in the database";
    }
}

by form i mean there is a search form on the previous page. This page is the page where it tells you whether the text put into the search form matches a line in the file (ex: Line 1: BOOT Line 2: Tree Search entry: Tree Echo msg: Tree WAS found in the database.)

It is currently not working like i intended.

Answer 1

If you only want to know if the search string was in the file, and don’t care on which line, then strpos() (doc) with file_get_contents() might be for you like this:

$file = file_get_contents('SLIST.txt');
$search = $_POST['search'];

if (strpos($file,$search)){
    echo $search . " WAS found in the database";
}
else 
{
    echo $search . " was NOT found in the database";
}

If you want to know the line, your solutions should work as well if you change the if($line == $search) with my strpos().

If the line has to be exactly the search query you are looking for, then your solution should work just fine