CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpcsvdelimiter
Christoffer
Christoffer

Reputation: 7777

Use array of delimiters

I'm using fgetcsv to read csv files in my application. Problem is that I don't know if my users will use ,, |, or ; as delimiters. If I tell fgetcsv nothing it will only accept , but if I tell it to use a specific delimiter it will only accept that.

What I'm doing now is:

while (($row = fgetcsv($fileHandle, 4096)) !== false) {

What I want is something like this: 

while (($row = fgetcsv($fileHandle, 4096, array(',', ';', '|'))) !== false) {

Is that possible in some easy way? It seems really weird that you would have to limit your delimiter to one specific character, since CSV is not standardized.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1232

Answers (3)

Christoffer
Christoffer

Reputation: 7777

Just to provide a simple answer for anyone else struggling with this. The solution I settled on was to replace all the delimiters to a specific character. Like this:

private function replaceDelimiters($file)
{
    // Delimiters to be replaced: pipe, comma, semicolon, caret, tabs
    $delimiters = array('|', ';', '^', "\t");
    $delimiter = ',';

    $str = file_get_contents($file);
    $str = str_replace($delimiters, $delimiter, $str);
    file_put_contents($file, $str);
}

Note that this will replace all given characters to a ','. So this will only be a good option if you know that those characters will only be used as delimiters, not content. (as in my case)

Also did a blog post about it.

Upvotes: 0

Ezra
Ezra

Reputation: 1418

Use the league/csv package, this has a detection feature and more features that make it worth using it over fgetcsv.

Upvotes: 1

hek2mgl
hek2mgl

Reputation: 157967

You cannot reliably determine the delimiter of a csv file if you don't know it. Take this simple example:

foo;bar,hello;world

What is the delimiter? , or ;? If you would pass an array array(',',';') what data are you expecting fgetcsv() will return?

If you don't know the delimiter you need to ask the user for it.

Upvotes: 6

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