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PHP

Posted by nicholas maddren
nicholas maddren
12,793 Points

FOpen & CSV Files

Hello community :) I have a client wanting their data displayed on the front end of their website. The data is stored in a CSV file that is uploaded onto their server daily. Would it be good practice to display this data straight from the CSV file using FOpen? The data in the CSV file contains vehicles for sale and need to dissolve if they no longer appear in the CSV file. Before I start developing I would like to know the best method for this. I will be using wordpress and would like to show a history in the backend of all cars sold. I am starting to think that I would need to use more than FOpen if I am wanting to store a history of vehicles. Any help on this would be great thanks :)

1 Answer

Ron McCranie
Ron McCranie
7,837 Points
Ron McCranie
Ron McCranie
7,837 Points

You could open the CSV file every time the data is requested but that would be highly inefficient. I think a better method, which might be a little more advanced, would be to setup a cron job to run after the file is uploaded (maybe an hour later). That cron job would just run a PHP file, which could add all new CSV rows to a database and update rows if some other data for an existing vehicle has changed. This way you have a database to work with instead of opening a CSV file every time someone requests the data. This will be faster and give you more flexibility in analyzing and displaying the data.