Add or delete HTML table rows from an .html file using PHP

I worked on a PHP project where I needed to add and delete rows from an HTML table located in a simple .html file without any database support. The data for the table was provided by a web service. My HTML table looked something like this:

 Solution

1. Write HTML table to a file and surround each row with HTML comments containing unique id.
2. Use preg_replace function to find the row surrounded with unique comment and modify it.

How to...
First I had to figure out the file structure. In my case I needed three files:

1. file that contains the table
2. file to display table
3. file that executs requests.

1. File that contains the table

Knowing that with PHP I can append text at the end of file, I needed to create an HTML table that would allow me to add rows to it. Here is what I came up with:

Filename: table_include.html

Column one
Column two

Notice the comment about not including closing "TBODY" and "TABLE" tags.

2. File that displays table.

The table needed to be displayed in a "DIV" element.

File name: my_table.php

echo '
';
include("table_include.html");
echo '
';

Using PHP include function, I am including table_include.html file and completing table code by adding and below the include. In my case the table rows were generated dynemically as part of a different process. But one important part of the table row generating script was to surround each row with an HTML comment containing a uniqe string. I chose to use PHP's time() function for unique code. The table code looked something like this:

$rowid = time();
$table_row = 'delete rowColumn two content';

3. File that executes requests

See comments for details. File name: execute.php

switch ($_REQUEST["action"]){

case 'add':
//place the code that adds rows here.
//maybe the values for each row are submitted with a form
//for this tutorial I am using a loop to add five rows

for($i=0;$i<5;$i++){

//HTML table markup surrounded with comments
$rowid = time();
$table_row = '< a href="execute.php?action=delete&id=">delete row< /a >Column two content';

//Write the row to "table_include.html" using append "a" parametar
if (!$file_handle = fopen("table_include.html","a")) {
$error = "Cannot open file";
}
if (fwrite($file_handle, $table_row) === FALSE) {
$error = "Cannot write to file";
}
fclose($file_handle);
sleep(1); // we need to have a small pause for generating unique id with PHP time() function. Damn PHP is so fast. :)
}

break;

case 'delete':
$parameter = '';

$filename = "table_include.html";
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);

//replace pattern that looks for our $parametar and everything in-between
$replace = "%($parameter)(.*?)($parameter)%is";

//use preg_replace to delete the row found using $parameter pattern
$myNewText = preg_replace($replace, "", $contents);

//write updated table code to "table_include.html"
$filename = "table_include.html";
if (!$file_handle = fopen($filename,"w")) {
$error = "Cannot open file";
}
if (!fwrite($file_handle, $myNewText)) {
$error = "Cannot write to file";
}
fclose($file_handle); // close file

//redirect to the table display file
header("Location: my_table.php");

break;

}

Suggestion

One would be to use AJAX to call execute.php file. In the application I was working on I used jQuery for my AJAX functions.

See this code in action

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