Homework 3 – Group Work Solved

File Processing
In this assignment you will need to perform file I/O to create files that can be used to populate a database with values.  While it is not too terribly time consuming to create an empty database, it can take hours (days, weeks, …) to fill a database with data so that we can practice writing queries on the database. We will use PHP to create random data that can fill our database.
For the database we used in prior semesters I have two examples below of movie descriptions that were created for the “sakila” database.  
A Epic Drama of a Feminist And a Mad Scientist who must Battle a Teacher in The Canadian Rockies
A Astounding Epistle of a Database Administrator And a Explorer who must Find a Car in Ancient China
These both have the format:
A ______ of a _____ and a ______ who must ______ in ______.
The blanks are filled in with random data from a list of potential values.  For this assignment you will be creating random customers and addresses.  (In a future assignment you will use this assignment as a template to create items or inventory for a store, as well as some other data to insert into a database).
As part of the challenge for this assignment, the input files are given to you in DIFFERENT FORMATS.  You will need to read each file into memory and process each file in a slightly different manner.
Tasks
    1) I have provided you with several text files in the hw3 folder (where you found this document).  Open these files up in a text editor (not Windows notepad), and study the format of these files.  Some files have delimiters, some have a new value on each row.  These files provide you with a list of first names, last names, domains, street names, and street types – such as “drive”, “lane”, “circle”.  You may NOT ALTER these files.  You must read them into memory as they are given to you.
    2) Write an HTML page called start.html that has a single submit button that will start the processing in a php file that you will create.  Your form should start a php script called create_data.php.
    3) create_data.php will read the data from the text files into an arrays (you can split this among team members).  (Note for the domains, you will need to combine hotmail and com into “hotmail.com”).  Each element in each array should be a single field from the text file.  (The exception is the domain file wherein you need to combine two fields into a single value as specified by hotmail.com above).
    4) You should use the html <pre> </pre> tag and the print_r function to print each of these arrays.  Print a heading above each array to label them (i.e. first names, last names, etc …).
    5) You will now need to generate an html table of customer information.  You will use the first names, last names, domain names, street names and street types to generate random customer data from your input data.  You need to generate data for 25 people.  Every name should be unique, and every address should be unique.  A sample table with 2 customers is given below.

    6) The final task is to write your customer data to a file called “customers.txt”  The file should be formatted as shown below for the two customers shown in the table above.
Amanda:McCarter:248 Alleppey Street:Amanda.McCarter@exhange.com
Roger:Duggan:16 Mandaluyong Drive:Roger.Duggan@gmail.com