Question

I’m having a problem with arrays and file writing, what I want to do is take one file, and copy it onto another file, except with formatting added to it.

To be specific, this:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

Would become this:

<br /><hr />Line 1  
<br /><hr />Line 2  
<br /><hr />Line 3     

And I’ve sorta done that, but something weird happens. Instead of formatting all on one line, it linebreaks and keeps going. Like this

<br />1
THE END<br />7
THE END<br />0
THE END<br />Red
THE END<br />Silent
THE END<br />No ChangesTHE END   

My code for this is:

<?php

 $filename1 = "directorx_OLDONE.txt";
 $filename2 = "directorx_NEWONE.txt";
 $file1 = fopen($filename1, "r") or exit ("No");
 $file2 = fopen($filename2, "w") or exit ("No");

 while (!feof($file1)){
      $listArrayf1[] = fgets($file1);
 }
 fclose($file1);

 echo var_dump($listArrayf1) . "<br /><br />";


 $entries = count($listArrayf1) - 1;

 echo $entries;

 for($i=0;$i<=$entries;$i++){
      $listArrayf2[] = "<br />".$listArrayf1[$i]."THE END";
      fwrite($file2, $listArrayf2[$i]);
 }
 fclose($file2); 

 echo var_dump($listArrayf2);
 /*

 Open file1, r
 Open file2, w
 While it's not the end of the file, add each line of file1 to an array.
 Count the number of lines in file1 and call it Entries. -1 because gotta start at 0.

 Make a new array with the values of the old one, but with tags before and after it.

 */
 ?>

I’m sure there’s a better way to accomplish the ultimate goal I’m trying, which is detecting certain words entered into a form, (There’s probably a better way than making a formatted and non-formatted copy of what gets entered.) but my PHP vocab is limited and I’d like to figure out the long, prerequisite hard ways before learning how to do em easier.

At first I thought that it was because I was writing the OLDFILE manually, using the return key. So I made a script to write it using \n instead and it changed nothing.

Answer 1

Eh 🙂

At first, please take a look on var_dump and check what the function is returning (nothing, so correct usage is var_dump( ...); echo "<br />";)

Second, fgets reads string including newline character, so I guess you see in your string something like this:

string( 10) "abcdefghi
"

So you have to remove newline manually for example with trim.

Next, I’d recommend to (at least) take a look at foreach.

So I’d wrote the whole loop as:

foreach( $listArrayf1 as $row){
  $row = "<br /><hr />". trim( $row)."THE END";
  fwrite($file2, $row);
  $listArrayf2[] = $row;
}

You may also use foreach( $listArrayf1 as &$row) and in the end $listArrayf1 will contain exactly the same as $listArrayf2. When you need to preserve all other spaces, you should probably use $row = substr( $row, 0, -1);

btw: you can write normal code, mark it in textarea and by hitting ctrl+k it’ll get indented by 4 spaces