trouble with file() and a tab delimted file

[StuManUSA]

Hi. Here's the situation.

• I've got a .txt file database.
• It's about 18,000 rows and 9 columns.
• Tab delimited between columns.
• Newline between rows.

I'm trying to prep it so I can get some arrays and insert those arrays in to a MySQL database.

I'm doing this:
// read the file into a string
$datafile = file_get_contents('file.txt');
// break the string into an array base on newlines
$dataarray = file($datafile);

I thought file should break apart a string into an array based on newlines but it's not working. Is something wrong with my file or am I not using the right function?

[Matt_Kindig]

The function file_get_contents reads the file into a string, whereas file() takes a filename. What you want is simply:

// break the string into an array base on newlines
$dataarray = file('file.txt');

EDIT: You would then want to loop through the array using foreach and then use explode to get each column as an array.

[StuManUSA]

Hey your tips were helpful. Then PHP didn't detect my new lines cause I'm on a Mac. Luckily there is place for that in the php.ini

set...

auto_detect_line_endings = On

[Sxooter]

Assuming the file fits in memory, this is fine, but you're method will fail if you go over the memory limit.

The way I do it:

<?php
$filename = "myfile.txt";
$fp = fopen($filename,"r");
while (!feof($fp)){
    $row = fgets($fp,100000);
    $pieces = split("\n", $row);
    insert_function($pieces);
}
?>

This method will work for very large files (hundreds of megs) without running php out of memory.