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Let's say that we wanted
to list the territories and

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the armed forces, right along with
the other states in alphabetical order.

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We'll add a new file named combined_sort.

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We'll start by creating a master
array of all the options.

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We'll use the array merge function to
merge each of the files we want to use.

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Then we'll use the file function to
retrieve each line as a separate

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item in an array.

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I'm going to add an option
to the file function,

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that tells the function to
ignore the new line characters.

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This will trim the new line characters
from each of our elements, so

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that we can keep things clean, and
only add line breaks where we specify.

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Territories, And armed forces.

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Next, I want to sort these items.

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But I want to sort them
by the display name,

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without looking at any of the HTML tags.

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I'm going to create a function to
compare the values without tags.

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CompareStrings.

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We pass the strings
we're going to compare,

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And then we use the string case compare.

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This is a binary safe
case-insensitive string comparison.

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Then we can use the strip_tags function,
On both our values.

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This will just leave
the display text to compare.

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We can then return these results.

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Now I can use the user sort function,
usort, we pass the array states,

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and then we pass the function that
we want to use, compareStrings.

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This will sort our states array,
using our compareStrings function.

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Now that our array is ready to go,

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we can write it directly to a file
using the file_put_contents.

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File_put_contents uses the same write mode
that we used in the last file with fopen,

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but we can also specify a file append
flag if we prefer to add the contents

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to the end of an existing file.

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We use implode to join
our array as a string,

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and use PHP_EOL as the separator.

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This will give us a nice line
break between each option.

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Let's add a select, and
include this new file so

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that we can preview it in the browser.

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Let's use sorted instead of combined.

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Then it won't overwrite the other file.

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Now I have a dropdown that includes
states, territories, and armed forces,

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all in alphabetical order.

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There are a lot more functions, feature,
and options when it comes to reading and

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writing files.

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But until you're actually going to use
them, they won't do you much good.

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Scan through the documentation to
get an idea of what is available, so

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that when you do need to use it,
you're ready.

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Now that you know
the basics of reading and

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writing files with PHP, let's add
a parsing component in the next section.

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We'll use some of the most common
data types, and show how PHP

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can parse those files to create a data
driven, personal recommendation site.