initialise multidim array from file

Anon

hi all -
I have a line separated, tab-delimited file which I want to load into a multidensional array

eg
file:
article1 [tab] poster1 [tab] date
article2 [tab] poster2 [tab] date

I want to put this in an array where
$array[0][0] is article1
$array[0][1] is poster1
$array[1][0] is article2
etc

i can load each line into an array with file($file)
and the contents of each line by explode("/t", $line)
but how can I put the two arrays together...I'm going round in circles with for or while loops, not getting anywhere!

please help!

Anon

Hi!

Try this... lots ways to do this, here is one of them.

Best luck!

<?php
// $Id:$

$text = "article1\tposter1\t01/01/2002\narticle2\tposter2\t02/02/2002";

$your_array = array();
$lines_array = split("[\n\r]", $text);
while(list($index, $line) = each($lines_array)) {
$cols_array = explode("\t", $line);
while(list(, $col) = each($cols_array)) {
$your_array[$index][] = $col;
}
}

// Here we are...
print_r($your_array);

);
?>

Anon

<?
$file_array = file ($file);
foreach ($file_array as $line)
{
$line_array = explode ("\t", $line);
$multi_array[] = array (
$line_array[0],
$line_array[1],
$line_array[2]
);
}
?>

$multi_array is now 2D array with all of the data in subarrays. I would suggest futhering modifying the above code with more meaningful key names:

<?
$file_array = file ($file);
foreach ($file_array as $line)
{
$line_array = explode ("\t", $line);
$date = $line_array[2];
$multi_array[$date] = array (
'article' => $line_array[0],
'poster' => $line_array[1],
'date' => $line_array[2]
);
}
?>

now $multi_array has associative subarrays with meaningful key names and has the date as the key so it can be easily sorted by date by using ksort() or krsort(). You can refer to various elements like this:

$multi_array['date']['article']
or
$multi_array['date']['poster']

*this code assumes that every element has a unique date, if not you may want to use timestamps as key names.

Anon

Thanks - that did the trick
The list function helps a lot