[thelist] PHP Noob-comparing array element

[Bryan Talbot]

Hello folks,

It is with utmost reluctance that I ask for help, as I am a big believer in
figuring things out for myself. I am about to abandon this approach
and use MySQL, but I hate to leave a problem unsolved.

I have a registration form that stores Names and Email addresses into
a .txt file, and naturally wish to prevent duplicate Email addresses.
I'm exploding an array containing (name|emailaddress),
and can successfully display every arrayelement[1], but I cannot
make the subsequent comparison statement work.

Here's the code:

<?
if (!isset($name) || !isset($email) || empty($name) || empty($email))  {
  echo "Both name and email address are required.";
  }

$email = strtolower($email);
$file = file('subscriber.txt');

function issubscribed($email) {
  $subscribers = file('subscriber.txt');
  if ($subscribers) {
    foreach($subscribers as $count => $subscriber) {
    $info = explode('|', $subscriber);
    echo $info[1] . "<br>";

// I did that echo statement to make sure $info[1] is a reality-- //
// it displays a nice complete list of all the email addresses //
// BUT, the following comparison statement does not work:  //

    if ($info[1] == $email) {
       echo "The email address " . $email . " is already subscribed.<br>\n";
       exit;
       }
     }
  }
}



function subscribe($name, $email) {
  $file = @fopen('subscriber.txt', 'a+');
  if (!$file) {
    echo "Error: Couldn't open subscriber file.";
    }
  fputs($file, "$name|$email\n");
  fclose($file);
  echo "Done! Thanks.";
 }

issubscribed($email);
subscribe($name, $email);
?>

The subscribe($email) function works fine.
It will happily store duplicate addresses all day long.
No errors are displayed.
I have tried substituting an existing email address for $email in the
comparison statement and that doesn't work.
I have tried changing the order of the function calls in the script.
I have tried everything I can think of.....
and yes, I have RTFM.

Like I said, I'm a noob...what am I missing here...does anyone have an idea?

Thank you,
Bryan