News Box Mod

[suser]

I did a search of the forum and am not happy with the answers i found so maybe someone can enlighten me. I want to use a php script to read from a text file on the server and display its contents in the news box. One post i ran accross just said "its not allowed". I guess all i really need to know is what files contain the code for news box. Can anyone tell me at least that much if not more about doing this? thanks in advance

[vbgamer45]

The template that has the newsbox is in index.template.php of your theme folder.

[suser]

this is what i have for my code (this is just a snippet). Can anyone tell me why it causes my website not to work? The code in red is what i had added to try and get the contents of a text file to display in the news box.

<td width="262" style="padding-left: 5px;" valign="top">';

        // Show a random news item? (or you could pick one from news_lines...)
        if (!empty($settings['enable_news']))
                echo '
                                        <div class="headertitles" style="width: 260px;"><img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/blank.gif" height="12" alt="" /></div>
                                        <div class="headerbodies" style="width: 260px; position: relative; background-image: url(', $settings['images_url'], '/box_bg.gif); margin-bottom: 8px;">
                                                <img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/', $context['user']['language'], '/newsbox.gif" style="position: absolute; left: -1px; top: -16px;" alt="" />
                                                <div style="height: 50px; overflow: auto; padding: 5px;" class="smalltext">', $lines = file('test.txt');

foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
   echo "Line #{$line_num} : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n"; , '</div>
                                        </div>';

[vbgamer45]

Its not good code should be something like

Code Select Expand



<td width="262" style="padding-left: 5px;" valign="top">';

        // Show a random news item? (or you could pick one from news_lines...)
        if (!empty($settings['enable_news']))
                echo '
                                        <div class="headertitles" style="width: 260px;"><img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/blank.gif" height="12" alt="" /></div>
                                        <div class="headerbodies" style="width: 260px; position: relative; background-image: url(', $settings['images_url'], '/box_bg.gif); margin-bottom: 8px;">
                                                <img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/', $context['user']['language'], '/newsbox.gif" style="position: absolute; left: -1px; top: -16px;" alt="" />
                                                <div style="height: 50px; overflow: auto; padding: 5px;" class="smalltext">';

$lines = file('test.txt');
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line)
   echo "Line #{$line_num} : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";

echo '</div>
                                        </div>';


[suser]

It doesnt like that either. I get the generic "Template Parse Error!" message.

[suser]

I changed the code to the following and now my page displays but it doesnt display the text of my test.txt file. I added a simple "hello world" script just to make sure it was running the code.


<td width="262" style="padding-left: 5px;" valign="top">';

        // Show a random news item? (or you could pick one from news_lines...)
        if (!empty($settings['enable_news']))
                echo '
                                        <div class="headertitles" style="width: 260px;"><img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/blank.gif" height="12" alt="" /></div>
                                        <div class="headerbodies" style="width: 260px; position: relative; background-image: url(', $settings['images_url'], '/box_bg.gif); margin-bottom: 8px;">
                                                <img src="', $settings['images_url'], '/', $context['user']['language'], '/newsbox.gif" style="position: absolute; left: -1px; top: -16px;" alt="" />
                                                <div style="height: 50px; overflow: auto; padding: 5px;" class="smalltext">';





echo "hello world";

$handle = @fopen('test.txt', "r");
if ($handle) {
    while (!feof($handle)) {
        $lines[] = fgets($handle, 4096);
    }
    fclose($handle);
}


echo '</div>






                                        </div>';

[vbgamer45]

Were is the test.txt file located? try to use an exact path to the file. or relative path.

[suser]

i tried an exact path but it didnt work. any other suggestions?

[vbgamer45]

try using file_get_contents function instead

[suser]

try using file_get_contents function instead

This worked, thank you so much for your help.