Parsing delimited text into arrays

Anon

As always, a quick 10 minute project has turned pear shaped and I'm left stumped.

What I'm trying to do is take a file, where each line contains its own separate piece of data, and read in the file line by line, processing the data that's on that line (the data is delimited by |).

This's for an online survey, so I need a way of keeping track.

So far, my posting script writes the data to the file just fine, (3|5|2|4|2|1|4|5|2|...etc. where each number represents which option in that particular question they have chosen... so for question 1, they chose the 3rd option, question2 they chose the 5th option, and so on.)

I'm pretty positive that explode() will be used and I think I'm pretty comfortabe with that. I attempted to use a 2 dimensional array but that didn't work out well - Could somebody lend a hand and some expertise as to the logic involved in processing the stats to create a readily available average of what options people are selecting etc.

This is turning out to be one of those problem's where you think you've got it but you just can't turn on the switch.

If anybody's got anything, I'd appreciate it greatly.

-Travis

Anon

you may want to combine list() with explode depending on how many items you have per line.

like this:

myarray=array();
list(myarray['item1'][],myarray['item2'][], myarray['item3']) = explode($line, " | ");

I may have the args in the wrong order there, but you get the idea.

khaine

If reading from a file you can use a combination of fgetcsv and explode. i.e.

if the file contained lines like

A1,3|A2,4|A3,3|A4,5|A5,1,2,3,4|A6,2
A1,3|A2,4|A3,3|A4,5|A5,1,2,3,4|A6,2
A1,3|A2,4|A3,3|A4,5|A5,1,2,3,4|A6,2
A1,3|A2,4|A3,3|A4,5|A5,1,2,3,4|A6,2

to parse it you could use.
<PRE>

<?php
$fpr=fopen("filename.ext", "r") or die();
while ( $fields=fgetcvs($fpr, 1024, "|") )
{
for ( $loop=0; $loop<count($fields); $loop++ )
{
$bits=explode($fields[$loop], ",");
for ( $loop2=0; $loop2<count($bits); $loop2++ )
{
echo $bits[$loop2].", ";
}
echo "\n<BR>\n";
}
}
fclose($fpr);
?>
</PRE>

That should read the file in and display its contents. It can also be expanded to handle multi dimensional arrays by adding more for loops that way you could have 10 dimensional arrays and still parse them quite happily.

Mark.