String Manipulation

[dspeer]

I have an interesting need for PHP...
My users will upload a file that I want PHP to do a little data processing on. The file will be a fixed width file with lines terminated by \n. I want PHP to grab certain segments of each line and load it into a MySQL table. For example... Position 1 for a length of 4 contains a store number, position 5 for 8 contains a UPC number, position 13 for 20 contains an item description, and so on. How would I get PHP to do this? I want to grab a line, load the values, grab the next line, load the values, and on and on. How do I structure this in the code? Thanks!

[bastien]

can easily be done with the [man]file() [/man] function which read the lines of data in based on a line return...then use the [mam]chunk_split()[/man] to separate out the smaller bitties...

takes two loops: one to move through every row from the original file and the other to move through the row itself to break into smaller pieces...or you could move one character at time through the row and separate the data out that way

hth