Ron's Guide - Flat File Poll

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Would you be an active poster if Ron's Guide had a message board?

Total Votes: 62
Comments: 18 — View
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Flat File Poll

Learn how to create your own poll script without a MySql database using PHP and flat files databases.

Now that we have our poll data stored, we can make a script to read this data and output the results of the poll.

Create a new file, I'm going to call mine results.php. Type or Copy/Paste the following code into results.php:

<?php // get the poll data $dat_file = 'poll.dat'; $poll_data = unserialize(file_get_contents($dat_file)); // define question, options, and votes $question = $poll_data['question']; $options = $poll_data['options']; $votes = $poll_data['votes']; // count the number of options and votes $total_options = count($options); $total_votes = array_sum($votes); // echo out the poll question echo $question." \n"; // loop through each option for($x=0; $x<$total_options; $x++) { // calculate percentage if the number of votes // is NOT zero otherwise, the percentage is zero $percentage = ($total_votes != 0) ? number_format($votes[$x] * 100 / $total_votes) : 0; // echo out the option echo $options[$x].' '; // echo out the number of votes and percentage echo $votes[$x].' votes - '.$percentage."% \n"; } echo 'Total votes: '.$total_votes.' '; ?>

It may look like a lot, but the script above really isn't that hard to understand. I've tried commenting in it, so that should give you a better idea what's going on. I'll go through and explain each bit.

Lines 4 and 5 get our poll data from the file and unserialize it. This allows us to use the information just like a normal array.

Lines 8, 9 and 10 just define some variables that will be used later in the script. Pretty much the same for lines 13 and 14, they count the number of options our poll has and how many votes have been made on it.

Line 17 echos the poll question. Finally, we get to the most important part of the script, lines 20-33. This is a for loop, the loop starts at zero and ends when it has looped the number of option we have in our poll. Each time through the loop the script calculates the percentage of votes each option has received. Then it just does a couple of echos, it echos the option itself and the number of votes and the percentage of votes for that option.

Finally, line 35 echos the total number of votes the poll has recorded.
If you go ahead and run the results.php file, you should come up with somthing like this:

This is a poll question?

Yes
0 votes - 0%

No
0 votes - 0%

Huh?
0 votes - 0%

Total votes: 0

Great! Our results are being displayed, now all we have to do is the voting part of the poll. Go on to the next page to see how this is done.

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Discuss Tutorial: Flat File Poll

93 Comments

Comment by Ron on Aug 15, 2004, 8:21 am

Please post questions or comments about this tutorial below. Smile

Comment by David on Aug 15, 2004, 9:51 am

This is an excellent flatfile database tutorial. You did well Ron, great work! Once I managed to debug my script I got it working pretty well, the bugs were from me typing it up by hand, not from the script it self. Once againt, excellent work Ron!

Comment by Flash on Aug 15, 2004, 2:27 pm

Gotta love the way you've set it out, Ron. Smile

Comment by jordan on Aug 20, 2004, 2:52 am

can i use this on my site lol
also the to codes on the last page what page do u add them into or do u add the mwhere u wont the poll to be placed

Comment by Ron on Aug 20, 2004, 12:09 pm

Thanks for the comments, David, and Flash, glad you like the tutorial Smile

Jordan, you are free to use the script for personal use. The very last code is to be saved as vote.php. When you have all of the files in the same directory, just put somthing like:

<?php
require('/path/to/poll/vote.php');
?>

To display the poll. Good luck Smile

Comment by jordan on Aug 20, 2004, 6:57 pm

thanks dude Smile

im happy now Tongue

it will be on my portfolio is that ok