Making my own plugin, starting from scratch, some PHP questions (my ongoing adventure

[jwocky]

** Hopefully this thread can become a resource for other newbies who want to learn how to do some PHP coding in relation to a vB hack **

Hey everyone, I've been a user here for a while now downloading the great plugins we have in this community. Now I need something custome but couldnt find anyone to take on the project, so I figured, what the hell.. I'll try to make one myself.

Now to begin with, I have no knowledge of PHP whatsoever, but i'm not a total idiot, and a pretty quick learner.. I also have general experience with coding from the old basic, then C++ days so I know the general concepts, but not the specific calls anymore.

I've been furiously reading the tutorials from the sites that have been generously stickied in this subforum.. but as always, the best way to learn is to learn by doing, so i've started on my project.

Now with that background out of the way, I've started on my voyage to making this custom script.

It has many stages, but I will try to build it step by step.

What my script generally will do in the end will be to take data about a certain user (data would be the users name, user start date and a user end date) and then do some functions based on whether or not todays date matches the pre-definined user start date and end-date.

As I dont want to mess with my databse and its tables, I decided to make a simple text file with the information as such:

UserName, Start Date, End Date
UserName, Start Date, End Date
UserName, Start Date, End Date


First thing for me was to poll todays date, which I have been able to do, yay!

Second is to poll data from the text file.

I've been able to pull the data using this call:

PHP Code:

function getnames()
    {
    $data = file_get_contents ( "users.txt" );
    return $data;
    } 


However now i'm stuck on how to parse the data properly.. Can anyone give me pointers on how to parse this info ? Ideally i'd like to separate the username, start date and end date into separate variables so i can compare them to todays date...

Thanks for any thoughts or answers!