Beginner PHP Tutorial - 81 - The implode Function with File Handling Example Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' and
this is another tutorial for the new
Boston now in this example I'm going to
be showing you something we did in the
previous tutorial we exploded data so we
took data from this file just here
names.txt that was comma delimited so we
had commas in the middle of each piece
of data and we read it in and took away
the commas and displayed it line by line
rendering it basically so we can do
anything with each name now suppose I
have an array like this one and I've got
three names in my array and I want to
add commas in between this data so as it
stands it's in array format we can
access each element of the array by
saying names array and putting in the
key of the array so here what would
happen was we dripped with output Alex
now I'm going to do completely what I
did with completely opposites what I did
with the explode I'm going to use
implode so I'm going to create a string
and I'm going to call this variable
string and I'm going to say implode and
give it the same comma that I did before
and in fact a space then what I'm going
to do is I'm going to give it the value
names array now what we've actually done
here straight away is we've we've taken
away the array we've taken away the
array and we've created a string so now
if I just echo out string you can see
that we've created a string from this so
if I was reading in that data with the
commas and I wanted to then say maybe
output some updated data I need some way
of taking that array putting commas back
into it
so I can pop it back into the file so
now what we can do is after this do our
usual file open business add just down
here open up the file right to the file
and append to the file so we can we can
you can use the previous tutorials to
achieve this so it's simply achieved by
the implode
and obviously you're not limited to what
you can put in here you could implode
using let's say hyphens so if we come
down here we'll get rid of this and we
could echo out string for example now if
I was to refresh you can see that
hyphens have been put in between the
data so this isn't just used for file
handling it can be used for a variety
different uses if you're trying to get
an array and you want to create some
string data out of that and you want to
use a little delimiter in here such as a
comma or a forward slash maybe even tabs
or spaces you can pop them in there and
that will implode that for you so if you
think about exploding and imploding it's
the complete opposite