[RESOLVED] Reading a text file with fixed column positions

colickyboy

I have a text file with certain fields in certain column positions in the file. I'd like to read the file in, look in certain column numbers in the text file and read in the values...then output the values on an HTML page.

How do I tell PHP to read a text file in certain column positions?

thorpe

depends what you meen by column positions... text files are just that, text. could we see an example?

colickyboy

here's an example of a boxscore from a .txt file. Fields like "POS", "MIN", "FGM-A", etc are in fixed positions of the file (e.g., "MIN" always starts at column 27...or 27 spaces from the beginning of the line, "FGM-A" always starts at column 35...or 35 spaces from the beginning of the line). I'd like to read them in and spit them into formatted HTML using PHP. I'm sure this is easy...

=================
February 15, 2005

Game 4/4 1st 2nd 3rd 4th TOTAL

Sacramento 42 41 37 31 151

Chicago 40 35 41 42 158

Sacramento

Player POS MIN FGM-A 3PM-A FTM-A OFF REB AST STL BLK TO PF PTS

B. Miller C 46 9-15 0-0 3-4 4 12 3 4 2 6 3 21

K. Thomas F 28 4-5 0-0 0-0 3 11 0 4 0 2 4 8

P. Stojakovic F 43 16-26 8-13 8-8 1 2 5 0 2 2 1 48

madwormer2

Read each line of the textfile into an array... (easy, use file or something)

Then, $arrayname[0]{4} line one character 5 or something.

Meh lol.

Example:

<?
$data="A B C~X Y Z~9 8 7";
$array = explode('~',$data);
foreach($array as $var){
$column1 = $var{0};
$column2 = $var{2};
$column3 = $var{4};
echo "1: $column1;<br> 2: $column2;<br> 3: $column3;<br><br>";
}
?>

Obviously without the file, but you get the idea.

LoganK

Couldn't you use [man]substr()[/man]? If you know the position of the columns, then you can specify the start and end with that function.

For example - you have text on column 50 (or position 50) and the next column is number 55. If my knowledge of substr() off the top of my head is correct, I belive it would be substr($file, 50, 55). (let me know if I goofed that up)

Jayant: I used your new "[ man ]" tags!

hitman6003

Could you do an explode on the line? for example:

$file = file("./yourtextfile.txt");
foreach ($file as $line) {
$line = explode(" ",$line);
echo "$line[0],$line[1],$line[2],$line[3],$line[4],$line[5],$line[6],$line[7],$line[8]";
echo ",$line[9],$line[10],$line[11],$line[12],$line[13],$line[14]";
}

which would output a line with each value seperated by a comma, but you can change that to put it in a table or however you want.

LoganK

That could work too, but although he could easily reference his start, he'd need to echo the variable for each word, which could get kind of annoying.

Hitman - about your sig: I prefer an "ID-10-T" error, or I just send luser straight to our resident BOFH.

colickyboy

the substr worked great. i used $buffer = fgets( $fp, 125); to read in a line at a time, then used substr to extract what i needed.

thanks so much!

LoganK

Allright then - mark the thread resolved!