php take users input write to file, and echo out the file for user to view

Question

How do I set this up such that when a user enters his first name and last name, I write it to a .html file and then give the user a link to view the information that they have just entered?

I know I could just echo that out like I am already doing with $_POST['userfName'] after Welcome, but I just want to write to some .html file and echo this information back to the user to view(see).

{ 
        $_SESSION['userEmail'] = $_POST['userEmail']; 
        $_SESSION['start'] = time(); 
        echo "Welcome, " . $_POST['userfName'] .  $_POST['userlName'] .". A new session has been activated for you. Click <a href="sometextfile.html">here</a> to see your information.";
        echo "<br>Your session id is: ".session_id(); 
    }

Answer 1

Like this.

 $message = ...;
 file_put_contents(dirname(__FILE__)."\message.html", $message);
 echo "<a href=message.html>Your message</a>

BUT your web server might now have permissions to write to the web directory. And it opens you up for all kind of badness. Imagine if a user wrote a php script in the message (<? echo phpinfo()?> for example) . now your server is compromised. You need to validate and clean your input if you do this.

EDit Nick is right, using the method i suggested will cause your users to overwrite each others messages. I wouldn't recomend doing this. Follow Nicks suggestion of sending the user to a dynamically generated page.

Answer 2

You want to actually generate a new HTML file for each user that logs in? That kind of defies the point of server-side scripting.

In fact, it's a bad idea security-wise to let your scripts have write access to your web server root.

What you'd want to do is link to "sometextfile.php?sessid=" or use a cookie containing their session ID, then generate that page dynamically.

If you just want to write a text file to disk somewhere, you can create a string then use file_put_contents (http://php.net/file%5Fput%5Fcontents). This could be put in the web root, but I'm guessing that's not actually what you're trying to do.

Answer 3

It sounds like you're stumbling into the need for a database! Congratulations!

Since you're using PHP, the easiest/cheapest route is to either install or get access to a MySQL server.

Then you can create a table storing your user's names, and give them a URL to access a dynamic page with their information on it, and you're on you're way to a promising career. For help with the MySQL, check out this tutorial.

Eventually you'll probably want to jump into a framework like Code Igniter, CakePHP or Symfony (to name a few) to start doing all this dirty work for you so you can concentrate on the fancy stuff.