Foreach & extracting one element in array

[monger]

I'm working with a php script that is reading in a file that may contain up to three elements per line. Here's the code:

$file = file('/home/user3/html/info/data.txt');
        foreach($file as $line){
                $bits = explode("\t", trim($line));

Ref

That's working fine and dandy. I can access the second element just fine with

 echo $bits[1]."\t";

But now, I need to take all ten of those second elements and pass them on individually. Here's my first stab, which didn't work:

foreach($bits as $port){
     $bits{1}."\t" = $port;

I scoured through the documentation as best I could. I'm not even sure of what to look for. So, could someone point me in the right direction? Correct any mistakes?

Thanks,
monger

[laserlight]

Consider:

$file = file('/home/user3/html/info/data.txt');
foreach ($file as $line) {
	$temp = explode("\t", trim($line));
	$bits[] = $temp[1];
}
print_r($bits);

Note that $bits{1} cant be correct since $bits isnt intended to be a string anyway, but an array.
Furthermore, one cannot assign an expression to another expression.

[devinemke]

you need each character in the second "bit" into an array?

$file = file('/home/user3/html/info/data.txt');
foreach ($file as $line)
{
	$bits = explode("\t", trim($line));
	for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($bits[1]); $i++)
	{
		$second_bit[] = $bits[1]{$i};
	}
}

$second_bit now has each character from each second tab separated element from each line. if you use PHP5 this could be done even easier using [man]str_split[/man].

[monger]

devinemke:

Using the following code:

$file = file('/home/user3/html/info/data.txt');
foreach ($file as $line)
{
    $bits = explode("\t", trim($line));
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($bits[1]); $i++)
    {
        $second_bit[] = $bits[1]{$i};
    }
}

produced something similar, but not quite what I wanted. Here's the last portion of the output:

Array
(
[0] => 1
[1] => 3
[2] => 7
[3] => 1
[4] => 3
[5] => 8
[6] => 6
[7] => 7
[8] => 2
[9] => 2
)
As ran, and displayed with print_r, I'm posing the fourht "iteration" over the array. What is seems to be doing is adding each number, not as discreet entries (e.g., "22" or "137") but as elements - e.g., a "2", "2", "1", "3", "7"... How are these numbers going to be dealt with down the line? I'm not even sure how to feed them to any other function since they are "broken" up.

The code, as I read it, seems to be saying that as long as we have a valid non-zero number in $bits[1], we append it to $i, which $sedond_bit then picks up? Right, wrong?

Gracias,
monger

[devinemke]

let's backup here. what does /home/user3/html/info/data.txt look like? each line has groups of numbers separated by tabs? and within each group separated by spaces? is that right? post a little taste of data.txt.

[monger]

Here's a few lines of data.txt:

netbios-ns 137
netbios-dgm 138 Windows File Sharing
bootps 67
ssh 22 Secure Shell, old versions are vulnerable

What I'm after is the second field, the port number. And as you seen, some lines may have a third field, but not necessarily. It's also unneeded, at least for this purpose.

Thanks,
monger

[devinemke]

so you need only what follows the first tab on each line right? that exactly what laserlight posted above.

[monger]

Thanks. Looked at that code again, and it's working. Now, I'll just use array_shift to handle the data.

Thanks for your paitence and help devinemke,

monger