Write YouTube Video Website Page Files with PHP
PHP can write just about anything. The script below will concentrate on YouTube video website pages.
The one thing you need to watch here is permissions. On some servers, you need permissions (CHMOD) set to 755 to use the PHP fwrite function, which all the file creations below use in their code. But on other servers (like ours, we discovered), you need permissions set to 777. There are people that understand why. We are not those people, nor is our server host. Older servers seem to need 777. Newer servers need only 755—which is obviously more secure. But this is not a hard and fast rule—your mileage may vary. If you find that you need 777, you may find your host blocks this setting. But you may find you can fwrite with only a 755 CHMOD (public_html AND the PHP script file setting). Some hosts disallow fwrite and even PHP file functions in general. You will find that write-nearly-any-type-of-file-with-php.html is the best place you can go for answers if you are testing a PHP script for writing a file and you get the dreaded permission error message.
There are times when you just need to use PHP to write various types of files. The list below shows you how—it's not hard at all. There are even five PHP scripts for creating graphics/image files. For image creation, we concentrated on the simple task of allowing users to input text and using PHP to take this text and put it in a nice box with a border and save it as a graphics/image file. Let us know how you like these scripts! We kept them as simple as we could so you could get the idea in a flash.
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- Write YouTube Video Web Page File with PHP
- Write Windows Media Video Web Page File with PHP
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First, notice that we escaped all the quotes in the $p string with backslashes. That's safer than trying to convert them to single quotes and ending up with an error because we missed a contraction somewhere. And of course, the newline characters are escaped too (\n). In the HTML, we centered the video on the screen. Then we used the classic embed method of putting an embed tag inside an object tag, since that's the method YouTube video embed codes give you when you grab the embed codes. The clip is just a short demo clip from a web page selling the software program MacDraft but you can change it to your own YouTube video using YouTube's convenient embed codes.
After the closing tag for HTML is a " character. That is the end of the PHP string with the variable name $p. Next we use fopen and put in a file name and a w for write. Then we use fwrite to write the file. Next we use fclose, which you should always do when using PHP file functions. Finally we CHMOD the permissions to a nice safe 644. A created file may be getting this CHMOD by default anyway, but why take chances? Of course, your host may not allow CHMOD from a PHP file anyway. Some do; others don't.
Here is the result: my_YouTube_video_webpage_file_written_with_php.html
<?php
$p="<html>\n
<head>\n
<title>My YouTube video webpage file written with PHP</title>\n
</head>\n
<body>\n
<BR>\n
<center><div>A YouTube video webpage file written by a PHP page. How do you like it?<BR>\n
<object width=\"480\" height=\"385\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/NXbO0eN4NQQ?fs=1&hl=en_US\"></param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"></param><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"></param><embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/NXbO0eN4NQQ?fs=1&hl=en_US\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" width=\"480\" height=\"385\"></embed></object></div></center>\n
</body>\n
</html>\n";
$a = fopen("my_YouTube_video_webpage_file_written_with_php.html", 'w');
fwrite($a, $p);
fclose($a);
chmod("my_YouTube_video_webpage_file_written_with_php.html", 0644);
?>