Could somebody help out a newbie?

[Anon]

Can somebody help a newbie out? This is probably v. easy for one of you PhP Gurus!

I have a flat text file, with pipes ("|") seperating the fields and linebreaks ("\n") seperating the records.

I can open the file and read the whole lot into a variable:

$file="default.db";
$fp=fopen($file,"r");
$filebody=fread($fp,filesize($file));
fclose($fp);

(Already this will cause scalebility problems, so how do I read in only one record and set a file pointed to after the next "\n"?)

I can then seperate the individual records out like this:

$records=split("\n",$filebody);
$rec_num=(count($records)-1);

I now have all the records in an array, and I want to go through them one at a time and split them into the seperate variables. This is where I always get unexpected regex errors. I'm trying to do something like this:

$i = 1;
while ($i <= $rec_num):
list ($key[($i)-1], $name[($i)-1], $email[($i)-1], $date[($i)-1], $body[($i)-1]) = split("|",$record[($i)-1]);
$i++;
endwhile;

I don't know if maybe the problem has to do with some of the fields (like $key and $date) being numeric?

Could someone please either correct my code, or send me an example of a more sophisticated way I can "pull" my data out from a flat text file. My future as a PhP Guru depends on it! smile
Regards,

Neil

[junebug]

just a thought but have you given any consideration to using a database instead of a flat file?

[[deleted]]

This flatfile business will get you big, big headaches.
It's not scalable, doesn't perform well, and is generally very irritating to use.

I strongly (very strongly) advice that you start using a databases instead.

Now on with your problem.
This next bit is quite a complex piece of 'doing it the hard way'

$i = 1;
while ($i <= $rec_num):
list ($key[($i)-1], $name[($i)-1], $email[($i)-1], $date[($i)-1], $body[($i)-1]) = split("|",$record[($i)-1]);
$i++;
endwhile;

For starters, why do you start with $i=1, only to subtract 1 every time you use it?
And why is the $i always in parenthesis?

try this:

i = 0;
while ($i <= $rec_num)
{
list ($key[$i], $name[$i], $email[$i], $date[$i], $body[$i]) = split("|",$record[$i]);
$i++;
};

Next problem, the regexp error.
This is because split() takes a regular expression as a pattern, and "just a |" is not avalid pattern. The 'pipe' is an operator inside regular expressions, so just putting "|" is like expecting PHP to understand a script that just contains "or".
To get it working you must 'escape' the pipe character like this:
split("|",$records[$i])
The backslash tells split that you really mean the | character, and not the operator it represents.

Moving on a bit further, why are you making seperate arrays for key/name/email/date/body?
You could also create one big associative array like this:

list($aTable[$i]['key'], $aTable[$i]['name'], $aTable[$i]['email']) = split("|", $record[$i]);

Then you can access any row of the 'table' like this:

echo "His name is ".$aTable[$iRow]['name']." and his key is ".$aTable[$iRow]['key'];

that is a lot easier to understand.