Edit a file

[rupam_jaiswal]

Hi,

Please excuse if similar query has been posted earlier.

 

I have text file in which I have to search a word and replace it with a new word.

 

First I do is to get the file contents with fopen,then read the contents , maintain a string $newcontent that holds the contents of file ,the moment i get my word,replace it with new word in the string $newcontent

After that I write the whole string $newcontent to file again.

What I want is to just while scanning  the file,the moment I find my word,replace it with new word there only instead of rewriting the whole file again.

Regards

[Adam]

I'm not totally sure this is possible, with PHP at least. As I picture it in my head (excuse any weak terminology) if you were to overwrite part of the file, you'd be overwriting certain characters / bytes, but obviously if the string was a different length you'd be overwriting the characters next to it, or even leaving some as they were. Effectively you'd have to shuffle all the characters after it into place - which is almost rewriting the file anyway.

 

As I said though this is just how I picture it, I have nothing to back this up. There may well be PHP support for it... I've just never seen or read about it before. How comes it's such an issue?