Problem: Address Book

This course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as "be reasonable." The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on problems is not permitted (unless explicitly stated otherwise) except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your code or writing to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints. Collaboration on quizzes and tests is not permitted at all. Collaboration on the final project is permitted to the extent prescribed by its specification.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from your instructor. If a violation of this policy is suspected and confirmed, your instructor reserves the right to impose local sanctions on top of any disciplinary outcome that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted or for the course itself.

Your work on this writing problem will be evaluated along four axes primarily.

To obtain a passing grade in this course, all students must ordinarily submit all assigned problems unless granted an exception in writing by the instructor.

Make sure you’ve taken a good look at the CS50 materials on HTML and PHP.

Here’s Doug with a discussion of PHP in a web development context.

And Daven with a few words on HTML!

For good measure, take a look at Doug’s video on PHP as well, if needing a refresher on the syntax beyond just that used for web development!

Once comfortable, its time to dive in!

Open up your IDE and make sure you have an updated IDE before executing (from within the directory where you are working on problems in Chapter 6):

Unzip and open up the directory. You should see five files when you list your directory’s contents:

It’s the CS50 Muppet’s birthday again! As one would expect, he has quite a few friends and, magnanimous muppet that he is, wants to invite them all to his birthday party!

Unfortunately, our friendly neighborhood Muppet has suffered an organizational disaster since his last birthday, losing almost all of his contact list. He has a few cobbled together from his phone^[1], others in his email^[2], and a select few he only has on business cards^[3]. Instead of sending out lots of individual invitations, our Muppet wants to email all his friends at once (sound familiar?). But to do that, he needs to have all his friends' contact information in the same place, and ideally have a way to add new contacts for safe(r) keeping.

The good news is, we’ve volunteered you to help CS50 Muppet out! The task at hand is to create a form in HTML to compile all of the necessary contact information, and make it so that when the form is submitted, the action that form takes is to execute a PHP file that opens up CS50 Muppet’s contacts list (stored in a CSV file—​do you remember what that is?), add a new line to it in that same format, and then close the file. You’ll use some of your previous experience working with PHP purely for scripting, as well as drawing upon your newfound knowledge of passing information from a form to a PHP file using $_GET or $_POST.

How do we do this and what shall you do? Allow us to briefly touch on the five files you’ve been given and make some suggestions on how to proceed:

When finished your locally hosted site should be able to:

This was Address Book.