ignoring parts of lines with outfile.. tricky?

[Cissa]

ok i need to export data from few tables every night with crontab and all that is ok and working...

now what i cant figure out myself is how can i ignore parts of the output to simple ascii file... heres what i have now:

select products_model,products_price + (products_price*0.22) into outfile "/my/site/and/my/files/whatever.txt" fields terminated by ';' lines terminated by "\n" from products;

that is ok exept i would like to drop out some parts of some lines ... example line:

Sample/Real text i wanna keep;1234.56

how can i drop that "Sample/" off from that line?

i have many lines that start with same text and i'd like to drop em all if possible... BUT (heres the tricky part...maybe) i'd like to keep that same text if it is in the middle of the line... so only drop it IF the line starts with it...

Thanks in advance again all! 🙂

• Cissa

[Sxooter]

maybe eregi_replace with this:

$line = "Special/moretext...";
$line = eregi_replace("^{Special/","",$line);}
print $line;

Note that the ^ at the beginning of a POSIX regex is a "left column" anchor.

On a linux box, issue a 'man 7 regex' command to view the synopsis of posix regular expressions.

[Cissa]

ok tryed:

$line = "Special/";
$line = eregi_replace("^{Special/","",$line);}
print $line;

but it returned:

ERROR 1064 at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '$line = "Special/"' at line 1

how i am doing this to clarify a bit.. (if it has any meaning to this):

i have daily cron that i run and the cron has:

mysql -u myuser -pmypass -D mydatabase < myscript.sql

and myscript.sql has that SELECT line in it...

any other ideas?

• Cissa

[Sxooter]

Sorry, that's PHP code, so you'll need to do something like:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q
<?php
$file = "somefile";
$fp = fopen($file,"r");
while ($line = fgets($fp,4096)){
   print eregi_replace("^Special/","",$line);
}
?>

I think the codes about right. Then the out put of that would be something you could feed into your import script.

[Cissa]

doh... 🙂

so theres no way to do all that in the SELECT? ..like ignore thingy or something... hehe

i know i'm asking silly things but i know you PHP-Gurus know all 😃

• Cissa

[Sxooter]

Well, you can do it in Postgresql. It has posix and SQL spec99 regex engines built in.

IT would probably involve importing into one table, then selecting into the final table to do it.

And if the built in regex wasn't enough, you could always do it in plPHP

[Cissa]

ok need to get some sleep now ... but i will continue my quest 🙂 in 6h when i wake up...

any other suggestions are welcome... if theres any...

Thanks Sxooter for your help... will get back to this in 6h.. nite all,

• Cissa