Dominique Laville

hi guys,

I have an object in second life which gets strings from a php server by HTTP request.

Everything works fine, but now I need the php script load the strings from a txt file (or mysql database) and then pass them to second life.
I just stored them on a txt file and I'm parsing it in order to create an array and pass it to second life. And unluckily it doesn't work.

I mean, if I use my browser and i make the request from my browser, everything works. But from second life it doesn't work anymore. (If instead I directly store the data in php variables, it works without any problem).

i.e.
[url]http://server/myscript.php?action=nextQuestion&next=0[/url]

answer: This is the first question of the questionnaire.

It works perfectly from the browser both if the answer is stored in php variables or in a txt file.
In second life instead it works only if they are saved in php variables.

Is it maybe a formatting problem ? I don't understand.. I'm frustrated!


ps. If you know an existing system to load questionnaire questions from a web server and upload the answers to it, let me know!

Hewee Zetkin

Hmm. Could MIME type be creating a problem? Have you tried setting the content type to "text/plain"?

Dominique Laville

I have a mac and I use TextEdit. Which formatting should I use ?

Unicode (UTF-16)
Unicode (UTF-8)
Western (Windows Latin1)
or others ?
how can I set the MIME type ?

With my browser everything works great, and I didn't expect a formatting problem since the text is loaded from the php script and printed. In the browser it is just plain text..

What's the problem ?

Viktoria Dovgal

For TextEdit, make sure you Format->Make Plain Text before saving. Otherwise, you'll get RTF and all its weirdness. And, you'll want to give the file an extension (.txt) so that the Web server has a hint that it should serve it as text/plain.

Dominique Laville

Ya, my file is txt and it is plain text. Please help me to find out a solution... i have a lot urgency...

since the questionnaire are quite long maybe it is better if i use a mysql database.. ? I have no experience with that, but if you tell me it is simple to implement it, i will do it.

Haruki Watanabe

uhm - what do you mean by «I just stored them on a txt file and I'm parsing it in order to create an array and pass it to second life».

When you call llHTTPRequest() you get the answer from the PHP-Script back in the http_response-event: http_response(key request_id, integer status, list metadata, string body) - here, it is the «body»-variable that you want to observe.

in order to put the stuff into the body, you need to output them in PHP...

e.g. echo "var1=".$my_var1."&var2=".$my_var2;

which would - if called from the browser - look like:

var1=the_var1&var2=the_var2

This would then be passed to the SL-script where you can extract the value-pairs using list-functions (for example).
Thus being said - you can't pass an array to SL (as your statement makes me think), you have to output the contents of the array in plain-text.

When you read a textfile into PHP, you could simply use:

[php]

$fp = file("my_file.txt");

$to_sl = implode("&", $fp);

echo $to_sl;

[/php]

which would read the entire file into an array ($fp), then collapse every line into one single line, the line-contents separated with "&" and then sent back to sl using «echo $to_sl»...

Hope I didn't get your post entirely wrong

[Edit]

Remember: the amount of data you can send back to SL using llHTTPRequest is limited to 2048 bytes (which isn't that much) - so if your textfile is longer, I sugguest you call llHTTPRequest several times only passing one line at a time back to SL

Dominique Laville

Hi, yes. it is exactly what I'm doing. I will copy some code to clarify. But I have a question: I used explode instead of implode. Which is the difference ?

So, here is the code of the script without loading from a txt file:

$questionsArray= array();

$questionsArray[0] = "1. First Question. How are you ?";
$questionsArray[1] = "2. Second question. How old are you ?";

..

//send next question
if ($_GET['action']=="nextQuestion"){
echo $questionsArray[$_GET['next']];
}


This instead is the code of the txt loading script:

$textfile = "questions.txt";
$handle = fopen($textfile,"r");
$questions = fread($handle, filesize($textfile));





if (isset($questions)) {

$questionsArray = array();
$questionsArray = explode("+", $questions);
}

...

//send next question
if ($_GET['action']=="nextQuestion"){
echo $questionsArray[$_GET['next']];
}



So, again. If the $questionsArray[0] string is stored in a local php $variable, everything works great.

If it is loaded from a text file in the $varable it doesn't work in Second Life. But it still works in the browser...

Since the web service I'm using does not have mySql service I really need to use a txt file..

Ordinal Malaprop

Firstly, you can just use $questions = file_get_contents($textfile); to get the whole file as a string, which may be a bit simpler. But otherwise it should work, assuming that your questions are delimited with "+" in the text file properly.

Try putting a print_r($questionsArray) after the point at which you read it in, and see what the response is. It shouldn't make a difference how you access it, whether through a browser or through llHTTPRequest.

I would also put header("Content-Type: text/plain"); at the top by the way, if you haven't.

Dominique Laville

1) can I remove the following headers from my php file ?
// Only works with PHP compiled as an Apache module
$headers = apache_request_headers();


$objectName = $headers["X-SecondLife-Object-Name"];
$objectKey = $headers["X-SecondLife-Object-Key"];
$ownerKey = $headers["X-SecondLife-Owner-Key"];
$ownerName = $headers["X-SecondLife-Owner-Name"];
$region = $headers["X-SecondLife-Region"];
// and so on for getting all the other variables ...


2) my questions.txt file is:

+
1. First Question. How are you ? +
2. Second question. How old are you ? +
3. What's your name ? +
4. I think; this is an important, test. +
5. Last question


3) I added header("Content-Type: text/plain"); but still nothing.. the text in my browser is changed thought

4) This is the result of print_r($questions); There are asian characters at the end.

+
First Question. How are you ? +
Second question. How old are you ? +
What's your name ? +
I think; this is an important, test. +
Last question਀䘀椀爀猀琀 儀甀攀猀琀椀漀渀⸀ 䠀漀眀 愀爀攀 礀漀甀 㼀  ⬫㔠⬠‫潷獲⁴湡睳牥

Dominique Laville

the crazy thing is that if I overwrite a question:

i.e.

$questionsArray[1] = "This is the first question of the questionnaire. What do you think about it ? ";


The system works perfectly for that question but it doesn't display the others from the text file.

I really think it is a formatting problem... by the way I don't understand. It is just plain text..

Ordinal Malaprop

1) If you don't use any of that information in your script you could certainly remove those lines.

4) Not print_r($questions), but print_r($questionsArray) just before you output the question - the idea is to determine whether it is parsing the file correctly into the array, which it doesn't sound like it is really.

Dominique Laville

ok, this is crazy!

If i copy/paste the print of the array to the forum, only the first 2 lines are displayed when I post it. So here it is the formatting problem...


Array
(
[0] => ÿþ
[1] =>


In the browser i see all the lines of the array.

I don't understand the symbols on the first line, but I ignore it by starting from the questionArray[1]

Dominique Laville

Sorry for the spam. I tried to copy it again, copying/pastying it on another textedit file but it still is incomplete.

If I delete the characters before the cut, I have to press delete twice. So they looks like special characters. I don't understand.. it is crazy plain text

Array
(
[0] => ÿþ
[1] =>F

Ordinal Malaprop

Er. Right. Well, that does look like an issue to do with character encoding, which is awkward as I am not very good with that.

Try using

header("Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");

at the start instead of the header that I suggested earlier.