CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phparrays
Anonymous_Coder
Anonymous_Coder

Reputation: 19

Reading from a text file and extracting specific data from it and then sorting it

Ive been trying to do this for weeks and i have been looking and trying lots of different ways with previously asked questions.

I have a text (txt) file which contains data on people like this: ID:NAME.SURNAME:AGE

1:hannah.smith:20:
2:bob.jones:40:
3:james.williams:19:
4:ben.higgins:25:
100:andrew.ross:70:
....

The file has about 150 lines of names in that format.

What i want to do is read from the file and separate each 'field' so they are all seperate(ID, NAME, SURNAME, AGE). I want to sort the data in alphabetical order from the first name. So:

100:andrew.ross:70:
4:ben.higgins:25:    
2:bob.jones:40:
1:hannah.smith:20:
3:james.williams:19:
....

I have tried using some of php's CSV file but i end up with lots of nested arrays. i tried this and this kinda works but i dont know how to sort it. If there is a better way of doing all of this then i would greatly appreciate it. But so far i have read the file but not sure how to go about sorting it in alphabetical order and maybe putting each field in a sorted array?

Heres my code so far:

$file = 
file_get_contents("/file_path", 0, 
NULL, 148);
        array_shift($rows);
            foreach($rows as $row => $data)
            {
                //get row data
                $row_data = explode(':', $data);

                $info[$row]['id']           = $row_data[0];
                $info[$row]['name']         = $row_data[1];
                $info[$row]['surname']  = $row_data[2];
                $info[$row]['age']       = $row_data[3];

                //display data
                echo 'Row ' . $row . ' ID: ' . $info[$row]['id'] . "\n";
                echo 'Row ' . $row . ' First Name: ' . $info[$row]['name'] . "\n";
                echo 'Row ' . $row . ' Last Name: ' . $info[$row]['surname'] . "\n";
                echo 'Row ' . $row . ' Age: ' . $info[$row]['age'] . "\n";
            }

Upvotes: 0

Views: 306

Answers (3)

Professor Abronsius
Professor Abronsius

Reputation: 33823

I think you can accomplish the sorting in a manner such as this, though in all honesty a database would be a much better solution.

The below uses an anonymous callback function as the second argument to usort which allows us to set whatever rules we wish for the sorting. 

$file=__DIR__ . '/sort-target.txt';
$lines=file( $file, FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES | FILE_TEXT | FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES  );

usort( $lines, function( $a, $b ){
    list( $id_a, $name_a, $age_a )=array_filter( explode(':',$a) );
    list( $id_b, $name_b, $age_b )=array_filter( explode(':',$b) );
    return $name_a > $name_b;
} );


printf('<pre>%s</pre>', print_r( $lines, true ) );

The contents of the source file is:

1:hannah.smith:20:
2:bob.jones:40:
3:james.williams:19:
4:ben.higgins:25:
100:andrew.ross:70:

The output is:

Array
(
    [0] => 100:andrew.ross:70:
    [1] => 4:ben.higgins:25:
    [2] => 2:bob.jones:40:
    [3] => 1:hannah.smith:20:
    [4] => 3:james.williams:19:
)

Upvotes: 0

marcellio
marcellio

Reputation: 32

Hi you could separate your data into arrays for further use and then alphabetical order hopefully that helped.

 // checking if file exists    
if(file_exists('file.txt')){    
 //open the file and get ready for reading Data    
 //make sure your file has permission on your server to read the file    
 $handle = fopen('files.txt', 'r');    
 if($handle) {    
  $Id = array();
  $email = array();
  $order = array();
  while(!feof($handle)){
   $data = explode(':', fgets($handle, 1024), 3);
   //store data in your array for futher use
   $Id[] = $data[0];
   $email[] = $data[1];
   $order[] = $data[2];
  }

  //sort array alphabetical order
  sort($email);
  foreach ($email as $emails) {
   echo '<pre>';
   echo print_r($emails);
   echo '<pre>';
  }

 }else{
   echo 'error openning file!';
  }

}else{
  echo '<p>File not found!</p>';
}

Upvotes: 0

Benjamin Baran
Benjamin Baran

Reputation: 11

It seems like you're over complicating it, all you really need to do is split the file by the line (file() already does this) then explode() each line by the : character, push the results into an array of arrays, then do an array sort on the result, like this;

$a = Array(
    1 => Array(
         0 => 'Peter',
         1 => 17
    ),
    0 => Array(
         0 => 'Nina',
         1 => 21
    ),
    2 => Array(
         0 => 'Bill',
         1 => 15
    ),
);
function compareByName($a, $b) {
  return strcmp($a[0], $b[0]);
}
usort($a, 'compareByName');
print_r($a);

After this, you just iterate and do whatever you want with the content, like maybe output to csv or something.

Upvotes: 1

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