[Nasimov]

It's possible to ammend data within a file vs. just adding data to the beginning or the end of the file? Mean to change something in the "middle" of the file.
Thanks.

[Brown]

i don't understand what you're saying.

[Stickman]

The earthplanet man wants to edit (or post data to) the middle of a file. Not just tag stuff on the end.

I'm sure you can - but I don't know how.

[Brown]

how about having three includes:

inc1.php
inc2.php
inc3.php

and just changing the middle one?

[And]

Take a look at PHP's string replacing functions - str_replace at php.net - you could also try using regular expressions to do the same thing depending on what you wanted to replace in your document.

[Brown]

if you just want to replace part of an html page, then you could have a text file as an include which you then edit through php. that way, a section of text on a page can be edited and the html code is not touched.

[DaiWelsh]

Originally Posted by Nasimov

It's possible to ammend data within a file vs. just adding data to the beginning or the end of the file? Mean to change something in the "middle" of the file.
Thanks.

The standard approach is to read in the content of the file, alter it then write it back out. Generally you cannot edit the middle of the file without following this process unless the changes do not alter the number of bytes. To explain what I mean, imagine you have this in your file on disk

abcdefghijklmnop

and you want to change efg to ggffee. If you only read the middle part of the file (putting aside how you know where to read from) then tried to write the new version back at the same location in the file you would get

abcdggffeeklmnop

because what you wrote back was longer than the original and so would overwrite 'hij' as well, thus messing up the rest of the file.

If you happened to be writing back the same number of bytes e.g. 'gfe' then you could in theory write it directly over the original using fseek() to move to the correct part of the file before writing, but usually it is

read whole file
change it
write it back over the top of the original.

HTH,

Dai