php program cannot change the values of text file - php

Question

I'm making a unique visitors counter for my website and I went for many tutorials, until I found this easy code but the problem is that the program never adds new ips or counts new visits . The values of ip.txt and count.txt never change :(
Here is the whole code :
<?php
function hit_count() {
$ip_address = $_SERVER ['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$ip_file = file ('ip.txt');
foreach($ip_file as $ip) {
$ip_single = ($ip);
if ($ip_address==$ip_single){
$found = true;
break;
} else {
$found = false;
}
}
if ($found==true){
$filename = 'count.txt';
$handle = fopen ($filename, 'r');
$current = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);
$current_inc = $current = 1;
$handle = fopen($filename, 'w');
fwrite($handle, $current_inc);
fclose($handle);
$handle = fopen('ip.txt', 'a');
fwrite($handle, $ip_address."\n");
fclose($handle);
}
}
?>

Answer 1

This code is full of mistakes. It will never work.
Mistake number #1:
$ip_file = file('ip.txt');
Each element on $ip_file ends with a newline symbol, so even if your IP is in the list it will never match $_SERVER ['REMOTE_ADDR']. file() must be run with the FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES flag.
Mistake number #2:
if ($found==true){
The counter will only increase and try to add the IP in the list if it was already found in the list. If the list is empty it will never do jack. Invert this logic!
Mistake number #3:
$current_inc = $current = 1;
It will never count beyond 1.
Besides that, you must make sure that the PHP script has permission to change those files. Usually the scripts don't have permission to edit the site files for security reasons.
All that said, your script should be changed to something more like this:
if (!in_array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], file('ip.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES)))
{
file_put_contents('ip.txt', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n", FILE_APPEND);
$count = file_get_contents('count.txt');
$count++;
file_put_contents('count.txt', $count);
}
Clean, simple, direct. But you still have to make sure the PHP script has permission to edit those files.