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A blog site which I am posting to during my learning of the popular programming language PHP. Feel free to leave comments!
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Making A Comments Form (Part 2)
Posted on April 7th, 2009 1 commentNow we have created our comments form (See here: Making A Comments Form) we now need to add a bit of code to the PHP so it can be stored and retrieved later on.
You can store data in two ways:
By using a flatfile;
or using a database.
As i’m learning PHP I ain’t sure which ones best for your needs but having a database is best to store mass amounts of comments where as a flat-file is best for storing less amounts of data and obviously depends on what you need it for. The following file I have modified so any comments my visitors made could be retrieved later on by opening up the comments.txt file.
<?php
$firstname = $_POST['firstname'];
$emailaddress = $_POST['emailaddress'];
$comments = $_POST['comments'];
$DOCUMENT_ROOT = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
$date = date(’H:i, jS F Y’);
?><html>
<head>
<title>Process Comment</title>
</head><body>
<?php
echo “<p>Following comment sent: </p><br />”;
echo “First Name: ” . $firstname . “<br />”;
echo “Email Address: ” . $emailaddress . “<br />”;
echo “Comments: ” . $comments . “<br />”;
$outputstring = $date.”\t”.$firstname.”\t”.$emailaddress.”\t”.$comments.”\n”;//File will be opened and be appended to
@ $fp = fopen(”$DOCUMENT_ROOT/../comments.txt”, ‘ab’);
flock($fp, LOCK_EX);
if (!$fp) {
echo “<p><strong>Your comment can’t be processed at the moment, please try submitting again later</strong></p></body></html>”;
exit;}
fwrite($fp, $outputstring, strlen($outputstring));
flock($fp, LOCK_UN);
fclose($fp);
echo “<p>Comment submitted.</p>”
?>
</body>
</html>
You will notice the new variable: $DOCUMENT_ROOT = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
You will need this line as it tells the script where the source of the file will be when you write to it.
Another new line I have added is: @ $fp = fopen(”$DOCUMENT_ROOT/../comments.txt”, ‘ab’);
This line is created so you don’t have to create the file path of the whereabouts of the file. This will be used again… The ‘@’ symbol tells PHP to supress any errors so you don’t get those horrible messages! The ‘ab’ at the end means append to the file if your wandering.
The next line: flock($fp, LOCK_EX);
This line is used so it disables other visitors from posting a comment at the same time by locking the file. I think there is more of a practical way of handling files later but I haven’t learnt how to do that just yet..
You will then notice these lines in the script:
if (!$fp) {
echo “<p><strong>Your comment can’t be processed at the moment, please try submitting again later</strong></p></body></html>”;
exit;What this does is that if an error is found when sending the comment, it produces that error message and then exits the script.
The next line:
fwrite($fp, $outputstring, strlen($outputstring));The fwrite means to write to the file obviously. You will have come across the $fp variable (the file location), the $outputstring has all the variables such as $emailaddress which are sent to the file. The third bit of this line ’strlen($outputstring)’ avoids cross-platform issues when sending the comment basically.
After the comment is sent, it is required to unlock the file so that another visitor can send a comment by using this line: flock($fp, LOCK_UN)
and then close the file itself by using this line: fclose($fp);
It’s a complex process I know (the whole comment thing actually) probably because I’m a beginner at this stuff so I would recommend looking around the web to find a better way of learning the process (which is what I did!)
(Post created on Tuesday, April 7th 09 at 14:55)