string parsing

DigitHeads

i have a text field which has previously been maintained by cgi. there are several elements in the one string all seperated by the "|" character ie:

is there an easy way to loop through and pull out these elements into individual fields ? or an array ?

drew010

//assume data is stored in data.txt

$data = file("data.txt");

foreach($data as $line) {
    list($name, $address, $city, $state, $zip, $socksize) = explode("|", $line);
    //perform functions etc here on the line
}

that will read the entire file into an array, where each line of the file is an array element. then it explodes the string by | and puts the results in single variables.

DigitHeads

its a text field, within a mysql table, not a text file.

drew010

ok, you can still apply the code
list($name, $address, $city, $state, $zip, $socksize) = explode("|", $line);
but now $line must be a row that has been fetched from mysql.

$query = "SELECT * FROM table";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $line = $data['info'];
    list($name, $address, $city, $state, $zip, $socksize) = explode("|", $line);
    //do some stuff
}

this assumes the data is in the mysql field called info which is probably not the case, but its just an example.