php - Read each line of text of each file in a directory and place into array?

Question

I have a directory with text files in it and new text files getting added each day. Each text file is a school lesson with 4 lines of text. Line 1 is Lesson Number, line 2 is Lesson Title, line 3 is Description, and line 4 is Due Date.

I need, in PHP, to be able to read all current and future text files and place them into an HTML table. 4 columns in a table labeled Lesson Number, Lesson Title, Description, and Due Date. Each text file being 1 table row.

I've made a site to help out some homeschooled students but wanted to add this functionality to the site to help them view all past, present, and future lessons. I know a little PHP but can't wrap my head around it and it seems the more I try the more I'm getting confused. This is a learning experience for me.

I've tried using fopen but can only get it to open a text file and not a whole directory. I was thinking I need to get a directory listing, place that into an array, and use fopen to open each file in the array but I may be way off. Any help to point me in the right direction is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Your approach is one way of doing it. You could scan the directory for the files you need, and use the file() function to retrieve file contents in an array. I will only post partial code, as getting file names from a directory is obvious (see glob() in other answers).

//got file list from a given directory in an array (array would contain file names). //it is recommanded, that file names to be with full path, or a relative path to the script

$task_array = Array();

foreach ($filelist as $filename)
{
    try
    {
        $file_content = file($filename); // we get an array with this function
        // you could do this the other way, by using fopen() and fread(), but this is easier
    }
    catch(Exception $e)
    {
        $(file_content = false;
    }

    if (($file_content !== false) && (!empty($file_content)))
    {
        $task_array[] = $file_content;
    }
}

Your task array will become a two-dimensional array, like this:

Array(

    [0] -> Array(
        [0] -> 1
        [1] -> 'Lesson Title'
        [2] -> 'Lesson Description here'
        [3] -> '2013-09-25'
    )

    [1] -> Array(
        [0] -> 2
        [1] -> 'Lesson Title 2'
        [2] -> 'Lesson 2 Description here'
        [3] -> '2013-09-25'
    )
)

Then, when you have this array, you could use foreach again, to display it in HTML.

However, if you would want to do this the right way, you should use a database, for example MySQL.