What are some common pitfalls to avoid when working with text files in PHP for storing and retrieving chat messages in a chat application?

One common pitfall when working with text files in PHP for storing and retrieving chat messages is not properly handling concurrency issues when multiple users are accessing the file simultaneously. To avoid this, you can use file locking to ensure that only one user can write to the file at a time. 

// Open the file for writing with exclusive lock
$fp = fopen('chat_messages.txt', 'a+');
if (flock($fp, LOCK_EX)) {
    // Write the chat message to the file
    fwrite($fp, $chat_message . PHP_EOL);
    flock($fp, LOCK_UN); // Release the lock
} else {
    // Handle lock failure
    echo "Could not lock file!";
}
fclose($fp);

Keywords

file handling fopen fwrite fclose file permissions

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