I struggled with this one for half a day, used what prosaic examples I could find .... then gave up

In the end I created a new file (I called it newmanager.php and it gets initialised on start up before forwarding to another page) and then used PHP's
fwrite function to populate the
user.php file in the same manner as it is now.
It works and that's all I care about.
Its not the most elegant of solutions - that would be to have it read directly from MySQL, but it works just as well as the original, so its integrity is still intact.
Regards
RL435
(sorry about the above signature .... I just wanted to see what the 'marquee' looked like ;-)