Parse Text Data Files

skiing311

Hi,

I have been using Perl, but I've decided to switch over to PHP because it's an embedded language, which makes it easier for what I'm doing. Anyway, I'm having trouble using PHP for parsing my text data files. I just can't seem to translate what I was doing in Perl into PHP.

I have a bunch of text data files in this format (for example):

<NAME>Mike</NAME>
<TITLE>President</TITLE>

I need to parse the data into a set of variables ($name, $title) so I can print the variables within the HTML. Once the data is loaded into the variables, I know how to use them, but it's loading them that I can't seem to figure out. By the way, there is only one record per data file, so once the file is open, it can parse the entire data file.

Does anyone know the best way to do this? If you could post some example PHP code, I would appreciate it greatly. Thank you so much for your help!

trexx

funny that just a perl-like php function may help you here. if you're already familiar with regular expression you should take a look at preg_match. (otherwise you should do a regexp tutorial first).

preg_match( '/<NAME>([^{<]*)<\/NAME>/i',} $text, $matches );

... should do the trick. you'll have the content of the name element in $matches afterwards.

dalecosp

Given a text file:

blah
blah2
blah3
blah4

and so on, try:

<? $file="blahfile.txt";
$fp=fopen($file, "r");
if ($fp) {
     $data=file($file);
     fclose($fp);
     $name=$data[0];
     $title=$data[1];
     }
echo $name."<br>".$title;
?>

To remove those tags, you could preg_match, but str_replace might be faster (?)

$name=str_replace("<NAME>", "", $name);
$name=str_replace("</NAME>", "", $name);

prior to the echo statements (which would be whatever activity you want to do with your vars....

HTH,

skiing311

Thanks for all the help. First of all, I can't do it by line because there are times when the data are on more than one line. For instance:

<MEMO>This is the memo field. It can have 
several lines

It may also have HTML, which will be printed 
exactly as it appears in the text data file
</MEMO>

I'm working with the first solution above (using preg_match), but I'm not sure if I'm using it correctly. First of all, here's how I'm opening the data file and loading it into a variable:

$data = implode('',file("text.txt"));

Is that wrong?

Then, I'm using preg_match, like this:

preg_match( '/<NAME>([^<]*)<\/NAME>/i', $data, $matches );

I haven't been able to get it to work yet, by the way.

And here is the entire parse function as it works in perl. (I use $vals{'NAME'} to print the variables in the Perl script.) I need this replicated as closely as possible in PHP:

sub parse_file{
	$file_text = join '', @file_text;

%vals = ();
while ($file_text =~ /<(.+?)>(.+?)<\/.+?/sg) {
$vals{$1} = $2;
}

#return a value.
1;
}

Also, what are the additional variable in the preg_match function? For instance, how do I use the $matches variable? Is it an array that is used this way: $matches['0'], $matches['1'], or can I use the text within the < > like this: $matches['NAME']? Thanks again everyone for your help.

skiing311

I got preg_match to work, but I don't want it to print the tag delimeters in the data file. Is there anyway to get rid of those?

dalecosp

Well, there are some ereg and preg replace functions....

ereg_replace()

preg_replace()

skiing311

Thanks for all the help, but I still can't reproduce what I used to do with Perl with PHP as well as I'd like (even with preg_replace). I like to use the text files because they are easy to edit and maintain, but since I can't get it to work well with PHP, I've moved the data into a MySQL database, and that's working well. Thanks again.

Mike

PS - I'm still interested in how this works in PHP, however 😉