I am trying to reorganize a website that has a lot of texts. I would like to be able to insert the text into a database or perhaps a large text file, and when a visitor clicks on the link, the correct paragraph(s) would be automatically displayed.

is there a way to do this? or do I need to create an html page for each part? what is best to do this, asp, php, flash, or other method?

Most sites that do this use a database, mysql and php would probably be the simplest for your needs, you don't need to create a real page for each virtual page. The easiest way to do this is using a local rewrite rule in apache.

ok,

i'm not a whiz at programming, but here's what I'm thinking:

for sql database

I'd create a table for each section:
table 1=section a

1 | Title | Paragraph 1 | Paragraph 2 | etc.
2 | Title | Paragraph 1 | Paragraph 2 | etc.
3 | Title | Paragraph 1 | Paragraph 2 | etc.
4 | Title | Paragraph 1 | Paragraph 2 | etc.
5 | Title | Paragraph 1 | Paragraph 2 | etc.

table 2=section b, and so on.

so, I think if a user clicks a link to create a page for section 1, story 1 I could arrange the paragraphs via html tables.

But there are a few things I don't know how I should do, for example, all parts have a different number of paragraphs, so how can I arrange the paragraph formatting? before I used css files and <p align=justified style:text-indent=.3in class=bodytext></p> but if I put all those paragraph place holders like this:

<p align=justified style:text-indent=.3in>DATA from SQL here</p>
<p align=justified style:text-indent=.3in>DATA from SQL here</p>
<p align=justified style:text-indent=.3in>DATA from SQL here</p>

would it cause problems if there was no data for a given paragraph? or is it possible to create this dynamically also?

And how would I arrange a next/previous link dynamically? I'd like the link to be active if there is a section before or after the page the viewer is looking at.

I know this might be quite a bit i'm asking, so i'm looking into an online tutorial about how to use php and sql, but I sure would appreciate help from the guys here :-)

just found out, that sql is english only, it can't handle east asian text :-(

any way to still arrange as database/data driven and allow use of east asian texts in the database?

I'm not sure where you got the idea that it is english only. Maybe some specific databases are but MySQL certainlys isn't. Take a look at all the wikipedia sites that use MySQL:
http://wikipedia.org/

You may actually want to consider using an existing cms system or wiki if you aren't keen to program something yourself.

i searched my webhost's forum and there it was said that SQL was english only...

is it that they have an english only version then?

taking a look at the source from the link you gave me:

<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" title="Zhōngwén">中文</a> •

this link is generated by a database then?

While its true that I'm not great at creating code from scratch, I'd like to do better, only way I know is to see someone else's code and learn from them, or ask them why it works that way if I don't understand.

Pretty much all of the text appart from html tags is stored in the mediawiki databases. If you take a look at the code you'll see.

If you do want to compare existing cms products then look at:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Even if you don't use them they will probably give you a few ideas.