Importing CSV file, with commas in text

Anon

Hello!

Our Patient-Mgmt system exports Patient admission data out as a CSV file. Any text-fields have speech-marks around them, and any number fields do not. The catch is, some of the text fields have commas in. I am trying to figure out how to Explode the lines into an array, so I can manipulate them, but I'm a bit stuck. I can't use comma as the delimiter, as the commas in some of the fields stuff it up. I can't use <speech-mark comma speechmark> as not all fields have speech marks.

An example of the data is

"CCU",20010608,"MOUSE","MICKEY, THE", 19540204

Here's my code so far.

while (list($key, $val) = each ($file))
{
$val = ereg_replace('\"', "", $val);

$data = explode(",", $val); 

echo "pWard= $data[1], pSurname = $data[3], and pFirstname = $data[4]<br>";  //test to see if the data has matched properly

} // end While (list($key...

Ideally I want a way of reading in by comma, but if it hits a speech mark, ignoring commas until it hits the next speech mark. Do I need to do some code to read each character, check if it's a speech-mark or a comma, then build the $data[] array accordingly?

ANy ideas would be appreciated!

Darren

ziong

try to use fgetcsv(), it will be in PHP3 >= 3.0.8, PHP4

Anon

That worked a treat! Then again, so did the 45-line routine I wrote to chug through each char in each line, checking to see if each char was a speech-mark or a comma, and acting accordingly.

Oh well, I guess it was good practice for trying to solve a problem!

In case anyone's interested, the working routine (adapted from the www.php.net documentation) is

$row = 1;
$fp = fopen ("/tmp/BOOKINGS.TXT","r");
while ($data = fgetcsv ($fp, 1000, ",")) {
$num = count ($data);
print "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br>";
$row++;
for ($c=0; $c<$num; $c++) {
print $data[$c]."  ";
}
}
fclose ($fp);