Capture data from file, put into db?

[surfimp]

Hey now-

I'm trying to parse a bunch of HTML-formatted surf reports that a friend has given me, and place them into a MySQL database of surf reports.

I'm using fgetss() to strip all the HTML tags and eregi() to do the pattern matching, but somehow what I've got isn't working correctly.

This is as far as I've gotten so far:

global $filename, $aFile, $buffer, $date, $out;

function stripIt($filename) {

$aFile = @fopen($filename, "r");

if(!$aFile) { 

	echo "Unable to open file"; 
	exit;

}

while(!feof($aFile)) {

	$buffer = fgetss($aFile, 4096);

	if($buffer=eregi("Date/Time",$buffer)){

	    $date = eregi("(Date/Time)(.*)(Location)",$buffer,$out);

		# additional pattern matches would go here...

	}

}

fclose($aFile);			

}

I am thinking that I need to buffer all of the text generated by fgetss() into a variable, and then do my pattern matching on that, but if I echo $buffer outside of the while(!feof($aFile)) loop, it's empty...so I am confused.

Any help much appreciated!

[surfimp]

Nevermind...I figured it out (and btw, I know that the way I used eregi() above has some mistakes in it). Here's what I should have done:

while(!feof($aFile)){

$buffer .= fgetss($aFile, 4096);

}

Then the $buffer variable holds everything that I need...d0h!