Append text to a local text file with JavaScript/PHP?

Question

I'm a beginner, and I'm just doing something for fun. Does anyone know how I can append data to a local text file on the server side? I would rather use JavaScript, but I can use PHP, and it would be perfect if I could call the function like this:

appendData(data, fileName);

Thanks!

What did you try so far? How do you run the code in the server-side? — Dekel, Oct 16 '16 at 00:54

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '16 at 01:49

2

If the file is huge you may not want to go the file_get_contents route (since it has to read the entire file and then write it out. You could do:

$fp = fopen($filename,"a");
fwrite($fp,$data);

"a" positions the pointer at the end for appending. If you don't mind cheating:

`echo $data >> $filename`;

which escapes to the shell.

answered Oct 16 '16 at 01:49

Danial

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And if `$data` has the string `>>` ? – Niloct Oct 16 '16 at 01:54
the shell method can be problematic if non alpha characters are possible. You can enclose in quotes; but you can still have issues with $ or [] or other special shell characters. – Danial Oct 16 '16 at 02:08
A backslash before those special chars would work. – Niloct Oct 16 '16 at 02:42

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

If you're using a PHP server, you can do something like this in php:

file_put_contents("/path/to/file", file_get_contents("/path/to/file") . $data);

You can't do this with browser JavaScript directly. This is because browser javascript runs on the browser and not on the server.

If you're running a node.js server (which is a JavaScript server and is different from JavaScript running on a browser) you can do something like below. See this answer.

var fs = require("fs"); // Get file system
fs.appendFile('message.txt', 'data to append', function (err) {

});

Append text to a local text file with JavaScript/PHP?

2 Answers2