Parsing a file Q

Anon

Hello,

I've got a plain text file that stores information that looks something like:

...etc

I'd like to be able to chop it up into a variable, array, whatever so I can use the names and values. I was going to do something like:

...
(get file contents)
...
$filearray = explode("|" , $contents);

but then I realized that if something was blank, such as the bit like:
Compute_Coupons|
Compute_Insurance|
It would throw off my counting
(e.g. $filearray[$i] where $i is even would be my field names, and the odds would be my values).

I'm sure this is relatively simple to do, I'm just not sure where I need to be looking =/

Anon

You could do something like this...

list($one,$two) = explode("|", $contents);

Then check if something actually got assigned to $two and finally create the array according to result.

Anon

...reading the text file line by line, that is.

If you read the file in with file(), then you can trim() (to kill off the trailing linebreak), then explode() each line:

$array=file('table.txt');
foreach($array as $line=>$value)
{ $array[$line]=explode('|',trim($value));
}

Now you've got an array. Each entry in the array is itself an array with two entries. Your example file becomes:

$array[0][0]='Ecom_ShipTo_Postal_Name';
$array[0][1]='John';
$array[1][0]='Ecom_ShipTo_Postal_Last';
$array[1][1]='Doe';
$array[2][0]='Compute_Coupons';
$array[2][1]='';
$array[3][0]='Compute_Insurance';
$array[3][1]='';
$array[4][0]='Ecom_ShipTo_Online_Email';
$array[4][1]='nobody@email.com';
$array[5][0]='Ecomp_ShipTo_Postal_Company';
$array[5][1]='Acme';