Question

I’m trying to set a persistent date stamp by writing it to a text file and then reading it back in each time the page is viewed.

// set the date, w/in if statements, but left out for brevity
$cldate = date("m/d/Y");
$data = ('clickdate' => '$cldate');  // trying to set a variable/value pair
 - It's throwing an Error on this !
// Open an existing text file that only has the word "locked" in it.
$fd = fopen("path_to_file/linktrackerlock.txt", 'a') or die("Can't open lock file");
// Write (append) the pair to the text file
fwrite($fd, $data); 
// further down …
// Open the text file again to read from it
$rawdata = fopen("path_to_file/linktrackerlock.txt", 'r');
// Read everything in from the file
$cldata = fread($rawdata, filesize("path_to_file/linktrackerlock.txt"));
fclose($rawdata);
// Echo out just the value of the data pair
echo "<div id='Since'>Clicks Since: " . $cldata['clickdate'] . "</div>";

Answer 1

Code’s fundamentally broken. You’re trying to create an array, then write that array out to a file:

$data = array('clickdate' => '$cldate');
        ^^^^^---missing

Then you have

fwrite($fd, $data); 

But all that will do is write the word Array out to your file, NOT the contents of the array. You can try it yourself… just do echo $data and see what you get.

You could probably make this whole thing a lot simpler with:

$now = date("m/d/Y");
file_put_contents('yourfile.txt', $now);

$read_back = file_get_contents('yourfile.txt');

If you do insist on using an array, then you have to serialize or, or use another encoding format, like JSON:

$now = date("m/d/Y");
$arr = array('clickdate' => $now);
$encoded = serialize($arr);

file_put_contents('yourfile.txt', $encoded);

$readback = file_get_contents('yourfile.txt');
$new_arr = unserialize($readback_encoded);
$new_now = $new_arr['clickdate'];