A Basic PHP Statistics Script

Wez Pyke — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:08:01 +0000

In this tutorial you will learn about writing information to a text file and then retrieving the information you wrote to the text file. Retrieving the files that are in a directory and about arrays.

This is a quite basic script and there isn't much to write about it so if there is something that you don't understand look the function up within the PHP manual online.

Step 1

In the first step we are going to get the current page that we are at and store it within a variable. The information in that variable will then be wrote to a file called stats.txt.

Include the following code in the pages that you want the number of visits to be counted for. If you have a file such as a header file than put this code in there.


 
// write current page to stats file
$cur_page = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if(empty($cur_page)) {
	$cur_page = 'index.php';
}
$file = fopen("stats.txt", "a+");
fwrite($file, $cur_page . "\n");
fclose($file);
 
?>

Step 2

The next piece of code that we are going to write is going to retrieve the information in stats.txt and put it into an array. We then use the function array_count_values to see how many times the page url occurs. We also retrieve the files in the directory which this script is in to compare them with the files in stats.txt.


 
$file = fopen("stats.txt", "r");
$files = scandir('./');
$num_files = array();
while(!feof($file)){
	$line = fgets($file);
	$line = substr($line, 1, -1);
	$line = explode(",", $line);
	array_push($num_files, $line[0]);
}
 
 
$num_cv = array_count_values($num_files);
 
foreach($num_cv as $f => $c) {
	echo 'file: ' . $f . ' - ' . $c . '
';
}
 
?>

If you have any other alternatives or need any help then feel free to post a comment.

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Retrieving an RSS Feed in PHP

Wez Pyke — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:23:38 +0000

RSS Feeds are widely used throughout the internet today and on all kinds of websites. From websites like Digg to most blogs. If you want to display an RSS feed on your website its probably easier than you think.

For this example I'm going to show you how to display the RSS feed for The Tutorial Blog using PHP.

The Code

The first two lines of code that we write are going to be what retrieve the RSS feed.

$file = file_get_contents("http://www.thetutorialblog.com/feed/");
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($file);

Now the next thing we do is use the foreach function so for each item found do something with it

foreach($xml->channel->item as $feed){
echo $feed->title.'
';
}

What are code will do is simply echo the titles of all the items found within the feeds. If you also want to include a link to the feed you can do this by printing to screen $feed->link.

All the code together should look something like this.