I need some help with my shoutbox

[Woad.php]

I have a shoutbox.txt that looks something similar to this:

[code]<div align="left" style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:10px;">
<b>Anonymous</b> ? <br>
<b>Anonymous</b> ? <br>
<b>24.16.80.177</b> ? <br>
<b>RA</b> ? <br>
<b>24.16.80.177</b> ? <br>
<b>asdfafdf</b> ? <br>
<b>asdfafdf</b> ? <br>
<b>asdf</b> ? Enterasdf Message<br>
<b>Beaches</b> ? Bork bork<br>
<b>Sup?</b> ? Hahaha<br>
<b>Anonymous</b> ? <br>[/code]

And right now I'm using this code to show whats been said:

[code]<table bgcolor="#292929" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="3"

cellspacing="0" width="98%">
<tr>
<td valign="bottom" style="background-color: #444444; border: 1px solid

#000000"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><?php

include "shoutbox.txt"; ?></font></td>
</tr>
</table>[/code]

How could I only show to people visiting the site only say the most recent 10 entries and delete the rest?

[btherl]

Instead of just adding new entries to shoutbox.txt, you can read in shoutbox.txt, delete the oldest entry, add the newest entry and rewrite it.  Is this the kind of solution you are looking for?

The "sophisticated" way would be to use mysql, but it's not necessary for something so simple.

[Woad.php]

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to do, but I couldn't figure out how to delete specific parts of the text file. Could you post the code to do all of that?

[btherl]

Hmm.. assuming the format of shoutbox.txt is fixed, you could do

[code=php:0]$shoutbox_lines = file('shoutbox.txt') or die('Couldn't open shoutbox.txt');
# This part depends on order of entries.. I am assuming the latest entry goes at the bottom, and top-most entry is deleted.
unset($shoutbox_lines[1]); # Delete the second line (numbering starts at 0
$shoutbox_lines[] = $new_line;
file_put_contents('shoutbox.txt', join("\n", $shoutbox_lines)) or die('Couldn't write new shoutbox.txt');[/code]

[keeB]

[code]
<?php
/**
* This apps assume 1 line / user.
*/

class shoutbox {

public static $sb_arrData;
public static $sb_text;
public static $sb_maxReturn=10;

public function shoutbox($textfile="shoutbox.txt") {
$handle = fopen($textfile, "r");
$this->sb_text = fread($handle, filesize($textfile));
$this->sb_arrData = explode("\n", $this->sb_text); //turn contents in to array seperated by spaces;
}

public function returnTotalCount() {
return count($this->sb_arrData);
}

public function returnTop10() {
$totalCount = shoutbox::returnTotalCount();
$last10 = $totalCount - 10;
for ($x=$last10; $x<=$totalCount; $x++) {
print $this->sb_arrData[$x];
}
}
}



?>
<table bgcolor="#292929" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="3"

cellspacing="0" width="98%">
<tr>
<td valign="bottom" style="background-color: #444444; border: 1px solid

#000000"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1"><div align="left" style="font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:10px;"> <?php
$s = new shoutbox();
print $s->returnTop10(); ?></font></div></td>
</tr>
</table>
[/code]

Reformatted your code to return the last 10 messages in the shoutbox. It is actually configurable by the [code=php:0]$sb_maxReturn[/code] variable.

Let me know if you need some more help...
- Keeb

[Woad.php]

Thanks guys for your help.