PHP and MySQL® Web Development, Fifth Edition

2. Storing and Retrieving Data

Now that you know how to access and manipulate data entered in an HTML form, you can look at ways of storing that information for later use. In most cases, including the example from the previous chapter, you’ll want to store this data and load it later. In this case, you need to write customer orders to storage so that they can be filled later.

In this chapter, you learn how to write the customer’s order from the previous example to a file and read it back. You also learn why this isn’t always a good solution. When you have large numbers of orders, you should use a database management system such as MySQL instead.

Key topics covered in this chapter include

Saving data for later

Opening a file

Creating and writing ...