Hello:

I'm trying to open a text file, change some content and then resave it. Instead of getting "newword", the file has "Resource id #3" in it.

Here's the code:

<?php
   $filename = "c:\\temp\\mydata.txt";
   $mystring = fopen($filename, "wb");
   $handle = fopen($filename, "wb");
   $newstring = str_replace("oldword", "newword", $mystring);
   $numbytes = fwrite($handle, $newstring);
   fclose($handle);
   print "$numbytes bytes written\n";
?>

But in the file written, mydata.txt, I get "Resource id #3".

Any ideas are much appreciated.

Thanks,

- Harry

You need to open your input file with a read attribute.   That returns you a file handle through which you read the file with a function such as fread. Then make your changes to the data, re-open the file for write, and write to it.

Example

Code:

$fname = "demo.txt"; $fhandle = fopen($fname,"r"); $content = fread($fhandle,filesize($fname)); $content = str_replace("oldword", "newword", $content); $fhandle = fopen($fname,"w"); fwrite($fhandle,$content); fclose($fhandle);

I've tested that code and it works.

Note that opening a file returns a file handle - you must read from that if you want to access the existing data. Also note that if you're writing back to the same file that you're reading from, you much complete the read before opening the file for write!


Mr. Graham:

You da man!

It works well.

Many thanks,

- Harry

An even easier way would be:

Code:

<?php $file = 'path/to/file.txt'; $file_contents = file_get_contents($file); $fh = fopen($file, "w"); $file_contents = str_replace('foo','bar',$file_contents); fwrite($fh, $file_contents); fclose($fh); ?>

curtis:

Thanks!

- Harry

Lol, now that I look back at Graham's, my way uses about the same amount of lines any way . Anyway, I guess it doesn't hurt to know different methods to do things

Just in case you might be interested, I'd recommend checking some of these out:

• PHP Filesystem functions - The list of all the built-in filesystem functions.
  
• flock - this function will lock the file you're reading/writing
  
• file_get_contents - this is the function I used to read the file into a string.
  

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