Php logging to a file with fwrite

Question

Question 1: What is the best way to write multiple variables?

I'm currently writing them like this.

fwrite($fp, $var1);
fwrite($fp, $var2);
fwrite($fp, $var3);
    ...etc

And that makes one long healthy string of output.

Question 2: How do I add line breaks and comments without writing something like:

fwrite($fp, 'var1:');
fwrite($fp, &var1); 
<br>?

Answer 1

Concatenation! You can basically combine a bunch of variables/strings into one big string, and print it all in a single fwrite.

ie:

fwrite($fp, "var1: " . $var1 . "\r\nvar2: " . $var2 );

etc

Answer 2

What the best solution would be depends on the use-case. If you could be a bit more clear about what kind of data you are writing we could give you an advise. But foremost take a look at all different file system functions . There's probably one you like :)

A few options:

Write away an array

$data = array('value 1', 'value 2', 'value 3');
file_put_contents(realpath('path/to/file'), $data);

Or an indexed array

$data = array('var 1' => 'value 1', 'var 2' => 'value 2', ...);
foreach($data as $var => $value) {
    fwrite($fp, $var .': '. $value);
}

Or if you want to include newlines ( \\n ):

$data = array('value 1', 'value 2', 'value 3');
fwrite($fp, implode("\n", $data));

options are numerous... more details = better assistance ;)

Answer 3

Another option might be to look in to using Monolog ( https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog ). Add something like the following at the start of your script:

use Monolog\Logger;
use Monolog\Handler\StreamHandler;

// create a log channel
$log = new Logger('name');
$log->pushHandler(new StreamHandler('path/to/your.log', Logger::DEBUG));

Then whenever you want to output something add:

// add records to the log
$log->addDebug($var1);
$log->addDebug($var2);
$log->addDebug($var3);

It's a bit more work initially but you end up with a much more flexible solution in the long run.