High Score Table: Writing a Simple Text File with Flash and PHP

Question

I am having a problem getting Flash to work with PHP as I need Flash to read and write to a text file on a server to store simple name/score data for a games hi score table. I can read from the text file into Flash easily enough but also need to write to the file when a new high score is reached, so I need to use PHP to do that. I can send the data from flash to the php file via POST but so far it is not working. The PHP file is confirmed as working as I added an echo to the file which displayed a message so I  could check that the server was running PHP - the files were also uploaded to a remote server so I  could test them properly. Flash code is as follows:
//php filewriter
var myLV = new LoadVars();
function sendData() {
//sets up variable 'hsdata' to send to php
myLV.hsdata = myText;
myLV.send("hiscores.php");
I believe this sends the variable 'myText' to the php file as a variable called 'hsdata' which I want the php file to write into a text file. The mytext variable is just a long string that has all the scores and names in the hiscore. OK, XML would be better way of doing this but for speed I just want to get basic functionality working, so storing a simple text sting is adequate for now. The PHP code that reads the Flash 'hsdata' variable and writes it to the text file 'scores.txt' follows:
<?php
//assigns to variable the data POSTed from flash
$flashdata = $_POST["hsdata"];
//file handler opens file and erases all contents with w arg
$fh = fopen("scores.txt","w");
//adds data to file
fwrite ($fh,$flashdata);
//closes file
fclose ($fh);
echo 'php file is working';
?>
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated - once I can get php to write simple text files I should be ok. Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks for your help.
I have got Flash working to a certain extent with PHP using loadVars but have been unable to get flash to receive a variable declared in PHP. Here's my Flash code:
var outLV = new LoadVars();
var inLV = new LoadVars();
function sendData() {
outLV.hsdata = "Hello from Flash";
outLV.sendAndLoad("http://www.mysite.com/hiscores/test23.php",inLV,"post");
inLV.onLoad = function(success) {
if (success) {
  //sets dynamic text box to show variable sent from php
  statusTxt.text = phpmess;
} else {
  statusTxt.text = "No Data Received";
This works ok and the inLV.onLoad function reports that it is receiving data but does not display the variable received from PHP. The PHP file is like this:
<?php
$mytxt =$_POST['hsdata'];
$myfile = "test23.txt";
$fh = fopen($myfile,'w');
//adds data to file
fwrite($fh, $mytxt);
//closes file
fclose ($fh);
$mess = "hello there from php";
echo ("&phpmess=$mess&");
?>
The PHP file is correctly receiving the hsdata from flash and writing it to a text file, but there seems to be a problem with the final part of the code which is intended to send a variable called 'phpmess' back to Flash, this is the string "hello there from php". How do I set up Flash and PHP so that PHP can send a variable back to Flash using echo? Really have tried everything but am totally baffled. Online tutorials have given numerous different syntax configurations for how the PHP file should be written which has really confused me - any help would be greatly appreciated.