Can anyone help me

selie posted this at 21:14 — 16th January 2002.

They have: 8 posts

Joined: Jan 2002

Hello everyone. I am new to the forum.

I have two questions actually.
1. I want a block of text to change on my website when it is loaded each time and I don't know the best way to handle this.
Can I create a group of .txt files and have them change dynamically?

2. My company wants to put their three magazines online and I want to simplify the process of creating the web pages. I want to set up a form where I can paste the text and when I submit the page it should look how it would on the web.

Gurudev posted this at 03:43 — 17th January 2002.

They have: 61 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

1. You can display any text dynamically on your page, if your host allows "server includes". If you want different text displayed from a group of texts, then you will need a script for this.

2. Can be done in a lot of ways, but need more info. How big are these magazines? Is it just one page or a lot of pages?

Let me know if this is/would be a paid. You can email me or use the pm.

thanks

selie posted this at 03:45 — 17th January 2002.

They have: 8 posts

Joined: Jan 2002

Actually the magazine is very large, consisting of atleast 30 articles per monthly issue.

Wil posted this at 09:57 — 17th January 2002.

They have: 601 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

1. This is easy. In Perl, something like this would do the trick nicely. Perl is know for it's speed in file-handling.

sub generate_random_text {

	open (RANDOM,"<$RANDOM_FILE") || die("Could not open $RANDOM_FILE $!");
	@allrandom = <RANDOM>;
	close(RANDOM);

	$phrases = join('',@allrandom);

	@phrases = split(/%%/,$phrases);

	$random_text = $phrases[int rand @phrases];

	return $random_text;

}

You would then create a text file with your blocks of text in, each deliminated by a %%. This is a quick sample of how your file might look:

Random Text
%%
Another Random Text
%% 
And another one

2. Yes this is also possible. I assume you're looking to create a template, and then drop in plain text on a form and this will create a file out of your templates? I've actually got a code similar to this already if you're interested. It would obviously need to be customised heavily, so give me a shout if interested.

- wil

yabber posted this at 12:48 — 17th January 2002.

They have: 93 posts

Joined: Dec 2001

Also you can do this using php includes
<? include("/path/to/text.txt")?>

then eveytime you update/change the text file it is shown on the page

Mika