populate Html table with remote files - html

Question

I want to create a HTML page that will have a table that will populate itself with info from 2 .txt files that are on a remote Linux Server.
or populate a html page on that remote server with the same info from those 2 .txt files and then access that html page using apache's webserver.
something as basic as possible would be nice but I can understand if it's complicated to do with html
honestly, any help at all would be nice.

Answer 1

I would personally do it in PHP. You can read the file and echo it into a table. You can then use the lines of the file for anything you want. I put comments in explaining each step. All you have to do is change $filepath to point at your text file:
Edited: Edited the code to add constraints mentioned by OG poster in comments. There is probably a more optimized way of performing your task, but this works and should introduce some new concepts to you if you are new to PHP
<?php
$filepath = 'files/the_file.txt';
if (file_exists($filepath)) {
$file = fopen($filepath, 'r');
echo '<table border=1>';
while (!feof($file)) {
$line = fgets($file);
$first_char = $line[0];
if ($first_char != '*' && $first_char != '^' && trim($line) != '') {
if (strstr($line, '|')) {
$split = explode('|', $line);
echo '<tr>';
foreach($split as $line) {
echo '<td>'.$line.'</td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
} else {
echo '<tr><td>'.$line.'</td></tr>';
}
}
}
echo '</table>';
} else {
echo 'the file does not exist';
}
?>
I'll do my best to explain it line by line instead of flooding the scrip with comments:
set your file path
If the file exists, continue on. If not, throw the error located at the bottom of the script
open the file
create the table ('<table>')
while the text file is being read, do a series of things: First, get the line. If the first character of the line is a * or ^, or when the line is trimmed there are no characters, skip it completely. Otherwise, continue on
if the line contains a | character, split (explode) the line at all of the | characters. Use this array of split up content and for each piece of content, echo out a new column in the existing row with the current content. Otherwise, there is not | found and you can just echo the line into a row normally
once you are finished up, end the table ('</table>')
Edit #2: The original solution I posted:
<?php
$filepath = '/var/www/files/the_file.txt';
if (file_exists($filepath)) {
$file = fopen($filepath, 'r');
echo '<table border=1>';
while (!feof($file)) {
$line = fgets($file);
echo '<tr><td>'.$line.'</td></tr>';
}
echo '</table>';
} else {
echo 'the file does not exist';
}
?>

Answer 2

HTML can't do anything, HTML is a presentation format.
PHP, Javascript, BASH could do the job in very different ways :
PHP : the server calls the 2 remote files and output the assembled html file into a webpage, then send it to the client
Javascript : the page itself calls the 2 files and add them in itself.
Bash + CURL : a BASH (or PHP, Python...) script creates a .html file containing the data of the 2 files.

Answer 3

One of these might help you, if you can precreate the HTML rather than doing it dynamically. These scripts take CSV as input and output an HTML table:
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/svn/to-table/
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/svn/to-table2/