spaces delimited text file

vyruz

to all php gurus, i have a problem over here and currently have no idea how to solve it.
Usually, in a text we either have a comma or tab or quote or delimited column such as

"field1","field2"
so we can use the function of explode to determine how many fields are there. But the problem now i have a file with few fields...and in a text file...and its delimited it "variable number" of spaces.. and each and every section have its own company header and so on, so how can i determine the number of field?

e.g

header (company name and address and date creatd)

field1 field2 field 3
aa aaa aaa
b bb bbbbbb

how can i extractout the label and fields to insert it into MySQL? using PHP script....

majiclab

Once you have an array of the lines, try using the preg_split() function.

foreach ($array as $line) {
    // split
    $fields = preg_split ("/[\s,]+/", $line);

// insert
mysql_query("INSERT INTO table (field1, field2, field3) VALUES ('$fields[0]', '$fields[1]', '$fields[2]')");
}

I'll leave the process of getting the array of lines up to you... but of course, if you need any help, don't hesitate to ask...

Hope that helps.

-Percy

vyruz

thanz for the rpely. I had tried but still cannot cause the number of spaces vary from line to line (not only single space)

its like

field1       field2     field 3

aaa              bbb

how to solve this? totally non-delimited but one spaces (few spaces and different row have different spaces)

majiclab

Hum, my post didn't show up right.

It should have looked like this:

foreach ($array as $line) { 
    // split 
    $fields = preg_split ("/[\\s,]+/", $line); 

// insert 
mysql_query("INSERT INTO table (field1, field2, field3) VALUES ('$fields[0]', '$fields[1]', '$fields[2]')"); 
}

The preg_split function will split on any whitespace or commas. The "/[\s,]+/" is a regular expression, but basically it says split on either a whitespace character or a comma, and the + tells it to split on 1 or more of those. So it should work. The problem with my original post was that the backslash was missing before the 's'.

Hope that helps.

-Percy

vyruz

thanz manage to put all those stuff into a array. but still there is problem

the label and the data all contain space as well...
for example "this is a label" contains 3 space in the middle...
then it will be store into 4 array's element. How to do it to store in one array element?

majiclab

First of all, this is a very bad structure of doing things!! This will only work if:

All the field values only have one space between words.
AND
All the spaces between the fields are AT LEAST two spaces. Otherwise there is no way to tell the computer when one field ends and the other starts.

To split the fields whenever there are 2 or more spaces, use the following code:

foreach ($array as $line) { 
    // split 
    $fields = preg_split ("/\\s{2,}/", $line); 

// insert 
mysql_query("INSERT INTO table (field1, field2, field3) VALUES ('$fields[0]', '$fields[1]', '$fields[2]')"); 
}

I also took the comma out as it seems that there might be commas in some of the fields. The code above will now split whenever there is more than one whitespace character.

So this will work:

field 1         field 2         field 3

But this will NOT work:

field        1            field  2                        field              3

As there is more than 1 space between the field values... so the above example would return 6 fields instead of the 3 you would want.

If there are more than 2 spaces in some fields, then you can increase the number in the code. However, as you increase the number to let more spaces in the field values, it also increases the number of spaces needed to separate a field. So if you did it up to 3, this would no longer work:

field 1  field  2  field 3

As there are 2 spaces between field 1 and 2, but also 2 spaces between "field" and "2" in field 2.

Yay for non comma separated files...

-Percy

vyruz

wow, thanz alot....thanz alot....it works perfectly..haha