Parsing A Data Feed

Question

I'm not the best at PHP and would be extremely grateful if somebody could help. Basically I need to parse each line of a datafeed and just get each bit of information between each "|" - then I can add it to a database. I think I can handle getting the information from between the "|"'s by using explode but I need a bit of help with parsing each line from a text file as a singular. Infact to make it even more simple, I just need it to use each line of a variable, I will submit content to the variable using a textarea and a form. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can read a file into an array of lines and do all the splitting with:

$lines = file("filename");
foreach($lines as $line) {
    $parts = explode("|", $line);
    // do the database inserts here
}

If you already have all the text in a variable as you said (e.g., with something like file_get_contents() ), you can explode on \n first and then do the same foreach statement as above.

Answer 2

If you are reading out of your textarea post, you can use the explode function using the newline character as your separator to get each "line" in the variable as a new element of an array, then you can do explode on your array elements.

i.e.

$sometext = "balh | balh blah| more blah \n extra balh |some blah |this blah";

$lines = explode("\n", $sometext);
foreach($lines as $oneLine)
{
    $lineElements[] = explode("|", $oneLine);
}

then you have a 2d array of your elems.

If you are reading out of a file, you can simply use the file function documented here:

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

to get each line of the file as an element of an array.

Answer 3

There is a ready-built PHP parsing library that can auto-detect the CSV format.

Example:

$reader = new Dfp_Datafeed_File_Reader();
$reader->setLocation('test.csv');

foreach ($reader AS $record) {
    print_r($record);
}

It's available to download here, and there's some documentation here.

Answer 4

If the file is small, you can use file() to read it into an array, one line per element.

Failing that, read the file in loop using fgets()

$handle = fopen("/tmp/inputfile.txt", "r");
while (!feof($handle)) {
   $buffer = fgets($handle, 4096);
   echo $buffer;
}
fclose($handle);

Answer 5

You can use explode to get both:

$myFile = "File.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$data = fread($fh);
fclose($fh);
$newLines = explode("\n",$data);

foreach($newLines as $s)
{
  $parsed = explode("|",$s);
  foreach($parsed as $item)
  {
    // do your db load here
  }
}