php text file news updates - php

Question

I am trying to make a news feed type thing in php.
I have a text file - news.txt and a php file index.php.
I have done the surrounding code and opening/closing the text file. Now I am stuck how to insert the new news item $newsnew to the top of the news.txt file and how to delete the old bottom news file in the news.txt file.
Is there any way to do this without deleting the whole file and writing it all again?
EDIT: Each news item is just a small string, say 500 characters, a single line.

Answer 1

Use a database.
If you really must use text files, use a different file for every news-item and name them sequentially like:
news001.txt
news002.txt
etc.
Then you can just add and delete files, read the directory and display what´s there.

Answer 2

Use the file() function to import the items in news.txt as an array, and use array_unshift() to add the new first item, and array_pop() to remove the last item. Join the array back into a single string and write it to news.txt:
$items = file('news.txt');
array_unshift($items, 'New item 1');
array_pop($items);
$newstext = implode(PHP_EOL, $items);
// write $newstext to the external file

Answer 3

If this is a XML file you could read it, parse it and delete the last child in the DOM. But if you have all your data in a DB it could be much easier to rewrite the file every time.
EDIT: after your edit: yes, you can do it like this:
write your new line to a new file
read the old file line by line and write it to the new one
skip the last line (detected by counting or EOF)
delete the old file and rename the new

Answer 4

No, there is not. But you might consider storing the messages in revers order. That way you only need to append to news.txt when new news arrive.

Answer 5

You are not going to be able to prepend to the beginning of the file without writing the whole thing out again. You could append to the end of it with the "a" mode flag to fopen(), but still to delete the oldest item you'll need to write out the entire file again.
Really, a database is solution here instead of a single text file.

Answer 6

There are many ways you can do it using the flat text file, but I'm not really sure it it's worth it. You can use some lightweight structured file or embedded database. For example SQLite, which would store it in normal file, no additional setup needed.