Edit PHP config file from HTML form

Here's my config file:

<?php
#config variables
$host =         ''; #your database host
$user =         ''; #your database username
$password =     ''; #your database password
$database =     ''; #your database title
$开发者_开发技巧page_title =   ''; #this appears at the top of the webpage and in the browser tab/window.
$tbl_prefix =   ''; #the prefix on your database tables. 
$installed =    false; #if false, you'll be redirected to an installation page.


if($installed == false) {
    header('Location: install/index.php');
}
else {
#connect to db
$consult_err = ' Consult <a href="lib/sqlerrors.html">lib/sqlerrors.html</a>';
$connect = @mysql_connect($host, $user, $password) 
                or die('Errno(1) - Invalid connection details.' . $consult_err); 
           @mysql_select_db($database, $connect) 
                or die('Errno(2) - Couldn\'t connect to database.' . $consult_err);  #select database
}
?>

I have an installation script that gets all the variables above from a user, checks to make sure there's a mySQL connection/database present, and creates some tables. However, I haven't found a good way to edit the above file with the user's input.

I'm rather stuck on where to go from here, but I need the end result to be taking input from a form, and having the variables in the configuration file reflect that input.

Any suggestions?

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I think that doing this will only lead you down a very difficult, twisty path. May I recommend using PEAR's Config package? It can generate, manipulate, and read configuration files in INI, PHP array or constant, XML, or generic formats.

Another option would be to only store the values that change very rarely (e.g. database connection info) in the configuration file and then store the rest of the configuration options in the database. This is how most larger PHP applications do it, I believe (I'm thinking of WordPress specifically). Users will have to edit the file manually if they want to change those settings, but since the more frequently-changed settings are in the database (and that's easy to hook up to your configuration form), they'll only very rarely have to edit the file.

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You can use the PHP filesystem functions to open the file and write out a modified version.