I'm having trouble trying to figure out how to use pagination in a certain way. I understand the method if you are running a query or listing specific items in a database. What I don't understand is how you generate pagination when all you have is a single HTML file that you want to split up into separate pages.

So far when I look for answers on pagination all I can find is stuff related to LIMIT statement and using offsets.

Say the book war and peace was typed out into a single HTML page. How would I use PHP and MySQL to separate that HTML file into multiple pages?

I've thought about including page tags, such as having
{PAGE 1}
blah blah blah blah blah
{PAGE 2}
blah blah blah blah blah

But this would require the tags to be manually entered and edited in the pages. It'd be much more helpful if I had a way for a single script to separate the pages entirely on its own. So warandpeace.html could just be uploaded onto the server and when it is accessed the pages are automatically generated.

help? please?

josh,

That's a tough situation and frankly when most people perform pagination, it is usually data coming out of a database, which is why you found so much information on LIMIT.

That said, I'm thinking about how you could take an HTML file and page it. If you read it in as a string (not War & Peace, granted), you may be able to explode() it according to <p> tag and then only print so many paragraphs on a page.

A less refined way would be to decide about how many characters to put on a page and do it that way, but you would have to write some "clean-up" code to make sure you performed the page break on a paragraph break or at least a sentence or word break.