reading semi formatted text file

Anon

201 PNCPS FINANCIAL ACCT 10027 3 8.00- 8.50 MWF GSB 400

I have a text file with rows similar to that above. I need to read the data in the rows into an array. fscanf likes to split the line into elements by spaces and I get

201,PNCPS,FINANCIAL,ACCT etc...

and I need results like
201,PNCPS FINANCIAL ACCT,10027 etc...

data[1]=201
data[2]=PNCPS FINANCIAL ACCT

data[3]=10027
data[4]=3
data[5]=8.00
data[6]=8.50
data[7]=MWF
data[8]=GSB 400

Can anybody provide any help on how to do this?

Anon

Dear Chirs,

just do it this way:

$data1 = substr($data, 0 , 3)
$data2 = substr($data, 5 , 10)

etc.
etc.

Or do they not have a fixed lenght?

Gr.

Kasper Schoonman

Anon

The problem of course is that there's no indication where one field leaves off and the next begins (what does a space mean?).

The tricky parts are the text fields (I presume spaces don't appear in numbers). You might want to look at preg_match() and build up a regular expression to match the parts. Off the top of my head, the regexp would look like

/(\d+) (.+) (\d+) (\d+) ([0123456789.]+) ([0123456789.]+) (.+) (\d+)/

Where (\d+) matches one or more digits,
(.+) matches any sequence of one or more characters (including spaces), and ([0123456789.]+) matches one or more digits or decimal point.

Warning: this won't work as it stands - it doesn't handle hyphens, for example, and you might need to replace (.+) with (.+?) - you'll need to experiment with real (and some extreme) examples.