Reputation: 259

PHP string manipulation

I'm reading a textfile on the format

Phone#(tab)Text(line break) (line break)

Or more specifically

4799999999  Hey! You owe us $576.53. Pay up to account no. 9760.00.12345, ID: 201561438.

4798888888  Hey! You owe us $199. Pay up to account no. 9760.05.12345, KID: 201565173.

4797777777  Hey! You owe us... and so on.

I want to store this in a SQL database, so I need to break this apart in phone numbers and text.

Any ideas on how to split the string into pairs in PHP? And should I store these values in a Array before saving to SQL, or should I just store it right away?

Upvotes: 1

Answers (6)

DisgruntledGoat

Reputation: 72580

I think you'd be better off using the strpos function, in case there are tabs in the text part.

$lines = file( $filename );

foreach ( $lines as $line )
{
    $tab = strpos( $line, "\t" );
    $num = substr( $line, 0, $tab );
    $text = substr( $line, $tab );
}

Replace the file function and foreach with fopen and fgets (see example) if the file is particularly large.

Upvotes: 1

Deniss Kozlovs

Reputation: 4841

$data = file_get_contents ($file); // Assuming $file holds path to file
if ($data) {
    $lines = explode("\n\n", $data);
    foreach ($lines as $line) {
        list ($phone, $message) = explode("\t", $line, 2);
        // do whatever you need with it
    }
}

Upvotes: 4

Jordan Running

Reputation: 106147

Assuming the file isn't huge, you can just read the lines into an array with file() and iterate over them like so:

$lines = file($filename);

foreach($lines as $line) {
  $line_arr = explode("\t", $line, 2);

  if(!empty($line_arr)) {
    // $line_arr[0] will be the phone number and
    // $line_arr[1] will be the text; insert them into your database
    // however you please.
  }
}

Upvotes: 1