parsing delimited data

Anon

Hi all -

I'm a relative newbie to PHP, and I've looked around a bit, but haven't found information that relates directly to what I'm working on. I have found bits and pieces, and I'm having trouble putting it all together to come to a solution.

I have a string that represents report data that is being returned from Curl interaction with stored procedures on MS SQLServer (please don't ask -- it's a long story, and this is the only way that the corporate data gatekeepers will let us interact with the D😎. The "rows" of data for the report are CRLF-delimited, and the "columns" are tab-delimited. I've managed to populate a multi-dimensional array with the data using

$arrayRow = explode("\n", $page_out); \$page_out is the string from curl
foreach($arrayRow as $r => $row) {
$arrayCol = explode("\t", $row);
foreach($arrayCol as $c => $col){
$arrayData[$r][$c] = $col;
}
}

and I need to put the array data into variables that can be used for output in the HTML for the report. How can I do that? I've had some luck with this using this instead of the above code:

$arrayRow = explode("\n", $page_out);
foreach($arrayRow as $r => $row) {
$arrayCol = explode("\t", $row);
list(my vars) = $arrayCol;
echo my vars;
}

The bigger question is which is the best way to tackle this problem. Is there a more elegant solution, or possibly even a built-in solution like fgetcsv()? Does someone have some code for something similar that
they'd be willing to share?

Thanks for any help you can give me,

Phil

mistcat

err So what are you going for here? I mean if you have a multidimensional array, why can't you just use that to print stuff out?

i.e.
For($i=0;$i<sizeof($arrayCol);$i++) {
for($j=0;$j<sizeof($arrayCol[$i]);$j++) {
print $arrayCol[$i][$j];
}

}

or is your question more like:
Whats the best way to parse this datafile into variables at all?

In which case I'd go with something like:
$arrayRow = explode("\n", $page_out);
foreach($arrayRow as $row) {
$arrayCol = explode("\t", $row);
$myRows[] = $arrayCol;
}

This will give you a nice 2d array to print out as you please.. if you wanted to get even more wacked out you could do some data mapping here with key/value pairs and then it would look just like data returned from a database query...
$arrayRow = explode("\n", $page_out);
foreach($arrayRow as $row) {
$arrayCol = explode("\t", $row);
$myRows[] = "name" => $arrayCol[0];
//etc,etc
// $myRows[] = $arrayCol;
}

Anon

Nate -

err So what are you going for here? I mean
if you have a multidimensional array, why
can't you just use that to print stuff
out?

Sorry I didn't supply more information. Usually I give too much, and no one ever answers my questions because the post looks overwhelming and intimidating.

Anyway, the report I'm working on is a PHP port of an ASP solution, and since I have no control over the data they send me, I basically have to use the same logic they use. Unfortunately, I can't just load the results of the stored proc into an ADO dataset and get on with it. I have to do some conditional output based on the values of the cols, mainly on a field called RecordType, which can be "H" for report header, "L" for a "line" of data in the report, or "S" for summary or subtotal. So I'm going to have to do some logic and output certain things based on the type of row the data represents.

At any rate, I appreciate your input. Your second example is just creating an associative array, right? How different is that from the list() example that I referred to in my original post? Which is easier to use?

Thanks again for your help,

Phil