Handling a comma-delimited file

studiobl

I'm trying to set up a way to transfer data from an Excel file to a MySQL database using PHP. In order to do this, I first save the .xls file as a comma-delimited .csv file.

I want to break the .csv file into individual lines, and then break the individual lines into fields. Because the file is comma-delimited, it's easy to break the individual lines with PHP's explode() function, but I'm not sure how to read the file one line at a time, instead of PHP treating it as one big string.

I found a tutorial at http://www.free2code.net/tutorials/programming/php/4/file2.php that seems to show that fread() places newline (\n) characters at the end of each line. I tried to use strtok() in order to process the lines one at a time, but it has not worked. When I try to echo each line in order to test, I end up with one line that contains the entire file.

Can anyone help me iterate through an fread() object, or provide another solution? Navicat is not a solution, because I am trying to avoid having the client but Navicat, and also my having to travel out of state to set it up for them.

Here's what I'm doing:

$path = 'comma_delimited.csv';
$data = fopen($path, "r");
$contents = fread($data, filesize($path));
fclose($data);

$one_line = strtok($contents, "\n");
while($one_line !== false){
echo "Line is " . $one_line . "<br />";
$fields = explode(',', $one_line);
$one_line = strtok("\n");
}

LordShryku

[man]file[/man] reads the file into an array, but have you looked at [man]fgetcsv[/man]?

studiobl

fgetcsv looks interesting. What I still don't understand is whether or not fread() delimits the .csv file with newlines. Here's a simplified version of the .csv file:

name, address, hatsize
name, address, hatsize

//I point to, open, and read the file

$path = 'comma_delimited.csv';
$data = fopen($path, "r");
$contents = fread($data, filesize($path));
fclose($data);

//Here's where I have problems
//I've been assuming that fread()
//places newline characters at the
//end of lines

$one_line = strtok($contents, "\n");
while($one_line !== false){
echo "Line is " . $one_line . "<br />";
$one_line = strtok("\n");
}

The echo command outputs the entire file instead of the one line I expected to get from strtok("\n"):

name, address, hatsizename, address, hatsize

instead of:

name, address, hatsize

I need a way of iterating through the flatfile so that I get one line at a time. If fread() really doesn't place newline characters at the end of lines, how can I keep the lines separate, especially since I don't know exactly how long a particular line will be?