PHP Counter Issue

Question

PHP Counter Issue

137 Views Asked by Houston Molinar At 06 April 2025 at 06:14

I have a counter that should be incrementing by 1 but yet it is incrementing by 2. I have the controller and view. It's a simple exercise but I'm not sure why it's incrementing by 2. Anyone have any ideas?

http://screencast.com/t/w9w7GndQK

CONTROLLER

function setCount($fileName = 'counter.txt') {
if (file_exists($fileName)) {

    //read the value
    $handle = fopen($fileName, 'r');

    // increment it by one
    $count = (int) fread($handle, 20) + 1;

    // write the new value
    $handle = fopen($fileName, 'w');
    fwrite($handle, $count);

    // close the file
    fclose($handle);
} else {

    // create the file
    $handle = fopen($fileName, 'w+');
    $count = 1;

    // set a default value of 1
    fwrite($handle, $count);
    fclose($handle);
}


return $count;
}

$count = setCount();

require('index.tmpl.php');

VIEW:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Counter</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="#">
</head>
<body>
    <p>You are the <?php echo $count; ?>visitor to this website.</p>
</body>
</html>

Original Q&A

There are 1 best solutions below

**Lion** · Answer 1

Using a text-file for this is bad practice and can result in inconsestent behavior. For example, when two visitors access the site at the same time: Visitor 1 open the file, increase the stored value lets say 5 to 6, and before it can save its changes another visitor open the file and do the same. Now a visitor is dropped because in both cases the counter will only incease once thought there where two visitors.

Instead you should use a database like MySQL to store the data. This make it also easy to build a more detailed counter. For example, you can get stats about how much people visited the page per day or which are the most frequented hours. It is also possible to track details about the users system (e.g. useragent which show what browser + version and operating system the user has) or log the referer to get informed from which pages your visitors came to you.

A simple counter-table could be consist of the timestamp and the ip-adress of the visitor.

CREATE TABLE pageviews(
    datetime INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    ip VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL
);

To track a visitor you need to run the following query:

INSERT INTO pageviews
SET datetime = UNIX_TIMESTAMP(),
    ip = "' . $db->escape( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] ) . '"

Now you can extract the data like you want. For a total-counter you can simpy do a COUNT(*) on the table:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS totalViews
FROM pageviews

You're free to display what you want, e.g. group by day as I mentioned before.

PHP Counter Issue

There are 1 best solutions below

Related Questions in PHP

Related Questions in COUNTER

Trending Questions

Popular # Hahtags

Popular Questions