I'm making this program and I'm trying to find out how to write data to the beginning of a file rather than the end. "a"/append only writes to the end, how can I make it write to the beginning? Because "r+" does it but overwrites the previous data.
$datab = fopen('database.txt', "r+");
Here is my whole file:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Facebook v0.1</title>
<style type="text/css">
#bod{
margin:0 auto;
width:800px;
border:solid 2px black;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="bod">
<?php
$fname = $_REQUEST['fname'];
$lname = $_REQUEST['lname'];
$comment = $_REQUEST['comment'];
$datab = $_REQUEST['datab'];
$gfile = $_REQUEST['gfile'];
print <<<form
<table border="2" style="margin:0 auto;">
<td>
<form method="post" action="">
First Name :
<input type ="text"
name="fname"
value="">
<br>
Last Name :
<input type ="text"
name="lname"
value="">
<br>
Comment :
<input type ="text"
name="comment"
value="">
<br>
<input type ="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
</td>
</table>
form;
if((!empty($fname)) && (!empty($lname)) && (!empty($comment))){
$form = <<<come
<table border='2' width='300px' style="margin:0 auto;">
<tr>
<td>
<span style="color:blue; font-weight:bold;">
$fname $lname :
</span>
$comment
</td>
</tr>
</table>
come;
$datab = fopen('database.txt', "r+");
fputs($datab, $form);
fclose($datab);
}else if((empty($fname)) && (empty($lname)) && (empty($comment))){
print" please input data";
} // end table
$datab = fopen('database.txt', "r");
while (!feof($datab)){
$gfile = fgets($datab);
print "$gfile";
}// end of while
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>
If you don't want to load the entire contents of the file into a variable, you can use PHP's Streams feature:
What this does is writes the string you want to prepend to a temporary file, then it writes the contents of the original file to the end of the temporary file (using streams instead of copying the whole file into a variable), and then it removes the original file and renames the temporary file to replace it.
Note: This code was originally based on a now-defunct blog post by Chao Xu. The code has since diverged, but the original post can be viewed in the Wayback Machine.
The quick and dirty:
You can use the following code to append text at the beginning and end of the file.
You can use
fseek
to change the pointer in the note.It has to be noted that if you use
fwrite
it will erase the current content. So basically you have to read the whole file, usefseek
, write your new content, write the old data of the file.If your file is really huge and you don't want to use too much memory, you might want to have two file approach like
The solution of Ben seems to be more straightforward in my honest opinion.
One last point: I don't know what you are stocking in
database.txt
but you might do the same more easily using a database server.file_get_contents()
andfile_put_contents()
use more memory than using thefopen()
,fwrite()
, andfclose()
functions:I think what you can do is first read the content of the file and hold it in a temporary variable, now insert the new data to the beginning of the file before also appending the content of the temporary variable.