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Writing a Text File

When I was 13 and programming in BASIC, a huge door opened when a friend taught me how to write save game data to file. There are many times when you might want to write a text file via PHP. Sometimes smaller amounts of save data is better kept in text files than stored in database tables. There are different modes of writing, the two most common are 'w' (normal write/overwrite) and 'a' (append mode). Append mode is great when you need to write an error log, or something similar. The PHP.net manual page for fwrite has a bloated example. Here's the straight forward approach that assumes no problems.

        $str = "Whatever content you want to write to file";
        $handle = fopen("path/to/file.txt", 'w');
        fwrite($handle, $str);
        fclose($handle);

If you get a PHP error or warning, its most likely due to folder or file permissions. Perhaps even to file ownership. The folder you are writing to must be of minimum permissions of 755. If that doesn't work, try 775. You could also do 777, but thats not good advice if you're using a shared hosting provider.

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