Question

I want to create a HTML page that will have a table that will populate itself with info from 2 .txt files that are on a remote Linux Server.
or populate a html page on that remote server with the same info from those 2 .txt files and then access that html page using apache’s webserver.

something as basic as possible would be nice but I can understand if it’s complicated to do with html

honestly, any help at all would be nice.

Answer 1

I would personally do it in PHP. You can read the file and echo it into a table. You can then use the lines of the file for anything you want. I put comments in explaining each step. All you have to do is change $filepath to point at your text file:

Edited: Edited the code to add constraints mentioned by OG poster in comments. There is probably a more optimized way of performing your task, but this works and should introduce some new concepts to you if you are new to PHP

<?php
    $filepath = 'files/the_file.txt';
    if (file_exists($filepath)) {
        $file = fopen($filepath, 'r');
        echo '<table border=1>';
        while (!feof($file)) {
            $line = fgets($file);
            $first_char = $line[0];
            if ($first_char != '*' && $first_char != '^' && trim($line) != '') {
                if (strstr($line, '|')) {
                    $split = explode('|', $line);
                    echo '<tr>';
                    foreach($split as $line) {
                        echo '<td>'.$line.'</td>';
                    }
                    echo '</tr>';
                } else {
                    echo '<tr><td>'.$line.'</td></tr>';
                }
            }
        }
        echo '</table>';
    } else {
        echo 'the file does not exist';
    }
?>

I’ll do my best to explain it line by line instead of flooding the scrip with comments:

1. set your file path
2. If the file exists, continue on. If not, throw the error located at the bottom of the script
3. open the file
4. create the table (‘<table>‘)
5. while the text file is being read, do a series of things: First, get the line. If the first character of the line is a * or ^, or when the line is trimmed there are no characters, skip it completely. Otherwise, continue on
6. if the line contains a | character, split (explode) the line at all of the | characters. Use this array of split up content and for each piece of content, echo out a new column in the existing row with the current content. Otherwise, there is not | found and you can just echo the line into a row normally
7. once you are finished up, end the table (‘</table>‘)

Edit #2: The original solution I posted:

<?php
    $filepath = '/var/www/files/the_file.txt';
    if (file_exists($filepath)) {
        $file = fopen($filepath, 'r');
        echo '<table border=1>';
        while (!feof($file)) {
            $line = fgets($file);
            echo '<tr><td>'.$line.'</td></tr>';
        }
        echo '</table>';
    } else {
        echo 'the file does not exist';
    }
?>