PHP or XML?

[Sophist]

Hey follks,

Just looking to figure something out here.I have a script that colects data and spits it out to a txt file. Now as you can imagine its not the easyest thing to read. Now what I would like to do is post the information in a table on a web page.

The thing I see giving my brain the workout is the fact that the data is not repopulating the old data it is just posting to the bottom of the txt file.( in essence making it way to huge to read or even look at.)

Now what I am wondering is if I would be best to use php or XML to make this happen and look right on a web page.

I guess the main thing I am wondering is if i redefine the output file to an XML file will it repopulate instead of writing to the bottom.

I'm at work and don't have everything i need to test this out so thats why I'm here if it doesn't and i need to look into other options I would like to do my homework at work if you can feel me.

Any help or suggestions to point me in the most logical direction is much appreciated.

[Force Flow]

You may want to start thinking about a MySQL database.

[kstatefan40]

Force hit that one on the head - insert the data into a SQL table, and then you can output rows into a table on the webpage.

I can post back tomorrow with the code and table structure... what kind of data are you collecting? Give me each peice of information and then I can help you with the specific coding.

[mairving]

Text files can be fairly difficult to manage. If you went the text file route you would be very limited in what you could display. You would first have to parse the text probably as space delimited which can be a bit problematic. Once you parsed it you wouldn't be able to choose what you display. You couldn't exclude columns or re-order them either. Plus once the session is over that text is no longer available. Pulling it out of a database gives you infinite options over pulling from a text file.