the purpose of this exericse is to allow students

Question

The purpose of this exericse is to allow students to practice using external files in support of web applications. For this exercise, imagine that the Batty League Flea Market accepts orders over the Internet. The web site will receive the order, then will display a confirmation web page. (NOTE: The site should probably do some other things, like notify the operator of the flea market and send a confirmation email to the buyer. For this assignment, though, you will concentrate on the web confirmation.)

• Create an ordinary text file named [lastname]-week-7-lab.txt. In that file enter text, including HTML tags, which will display information about the purchase.
• NOTE: This text will eventually be inserted into the XHTML portion of your PHP script, so include HTML tags to format the text in an appropriate way. However, do not include the header tags - treat the text in this document as the body of the page, rather than the entire thing.
• NOTE: Give some substance to your web page: "Congratulations! You have purchased . . . thank you for helping . . .". Use your imagination and write a decent web page.
• Within the web page, use the special text string [ITEM] to mark the place where the string identifying the item should be included. Use the special string [PRICE] to mark the location where the price of the item should be placed.
• Create an input form named [lastname]-week-7-lab.html which will ask the visitor to enter the inventory ID number of the item which is being purchased, and the price which is to be paid.
• NOTE: Naturally you would not usually allow the visitor to enter the price - eventually, you would build up this application so that it read that information from the database.
• Within the script [lastname]-week-7-lab.php, add instructions which will open the text file you have created for the web page and read its contents into a variable named $pageBody.
• Use the str_replace() function to replace the special strings [ITEM] and [PRICE] with appropriate pieces of information.
• Display the resulting web page.