Jezra.net: cloudy phone number finder

2009-11-02

For a while now, I've been keeping track of phone number by enter them into a plain text file on my laptop and searching for numbers with a simple shell script named phone

#!/bin/sh
clear
cat /path/to/phonelist.txt | grep -i $1

This is fine and dandy if I'm actually using my laptop, but I needed a way to access the phone numbers from all of my computers. If you are playing Buzzword Bingo, put a checkmark on "cloud". There is a low-power computer in my home network that will perform the task of "cloud based phone number listing" wonderfully.

Since "cloud" is a Web 2.0 buzzword, I figured I should make the user interface of my phone number finder behave in an AJAXy way, but without Javascript or XML. ( mark off Web 2.0,AJAX, Javascript, and XML )

Here is the HTML of the interface

<html>
    <head>
        <title>phone</title>
        <style type="text/css">
            #result_frame
            {
                border:0px;
                width:50%;
                height:50%
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form name='p' action='phone.php' method='post' target='result_frame'>
            <input type="text" name="search_string">
            <input type="submit" value="find">
        </form>
        <iframe name="result_frame" id="result_frame">
        </iframe>
    </body>
</html>

A simple form makes a request and the results are displayed in a targetted inline frame. Thus, there is not a full page refresh when the user selects a different name to search for. Oh shiney!

On to the searching code

<?php
    //get the search string from the POST data
    $s_str = $_POST['search_string'];
    //escape the string
    $esc_str = escapeshellcmd($s_str);
    //where is the phone file?
    $phone_file = "phonelist.txt";
    $results = "";
    //read the file into an array
    $file_lines = file($phone_file);
    //loop through the array of lines
    foreach($file_lines as $line)
    {
        //is the search string in the line?
        if( stristr($line,$s_str) )
        {
            //add the line to the results.
            $results.=$line;
        }
    }
    //are there results?
    if(!$results)
    {
        //if not, let the user know that there were no matches
        $results = "no matches found for \"$s_str\"";
    }
    //create some basic HTML to display to the viewer
    echo "<html><head><title>Results for $s_str</title></head>";
    echo "<body><pre>";
    print_r($results);
    echo "</pre></body></html>";
?>

This is a very simple PHP script to search for matching lines in the text file.

A working example of this code is viewable at http://www.jezra.net/code_examples/phonenumbers

Things that could have been done different:

the numbers could be put into a database
a regular expression could search the text file

The key here was development time. Comparitive to the actual development time, creating a database, adding the numbers, and writing the code to retrieve the numbers would add a significant amount of time. Unfortunately, I didn't think of using a REGEX until after I had written the code, and since the code worked as expected, I felt no need to change it.

Now quit reading, and call a friend.

cloudy phone number finder from jezra.net

Comments

2009-11-05 digi_morass:

handy Web 2.0 tutorial, Jezra. may play with this in the future. You might want to handle the error when the user clicks find on empty search query, though.

2009-11-05 jezra:

HA! Thanks digi. The example PHP code as been edited to only search the text file if the length of the search string is greater than zero.

if(strlen($s_str)>0)
{
//do the search
}

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