Fixed Field Flat File

fnbcprog

What I am trying to accomplish seems to be a little tricky in terms of the coding.

I have a fixed field length flat file in SDF (Standard Data Format) with about 1,000 records.

Each record contains an ID number (8) , SSN (11), Name (25), and Add Date (8).

i.e.
12345678222-22-2222John Doe 19920118

What I need to do is open the flat file and grab each record and set the different parts (ID,SSN,Name,Add Date) equal to variables (by using substr() I beleive) and post them to a MySQL table.

How in the world do I accomplish this task?

trexx

how about something like that? i don't have a working php environment here, so watch out for typos =)

$fields = file( 'myfile.txt' );
$dbFields = Array();
$fieldLength = Array( 8,11,25,8 );
foreach( $fields as $row )
{
	for( $i=0; $i<count($fieldLength); $i++ )
	{
		$dbFields[$i] = substr( $row, 0, $fieldLength );
		$row = substr( $row, $fieldLength ); 		
	}
	mysql_query( "INSERT INTO MYTABLE ('{$dbFields[0]}','{$dbFields[1]}','{$dbFields[2]}','{$dbFields[3]}')" );
}

fnbcprog

Do you know how to go the other way with it? Take the MySQL table and dump it into a flat file with no delimiters just space for actual width of the column.

i.e. -

ID char(9)
SSN char(11)
Name char(25)
Add_Date Date

Take those four fields and space them out perfectly like the text file.

100000001222-22-2222John Doe 19900205

Thanks

trexx

Sure... that's easy... just use the str_pad function:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.str-pad.php

... on each field, join the 4 strings and add a newline "/n" at the end =)

b.t.w. why not just use tab-separated fields? guess that would be much easier...