[RESOLVED] REGEX: Counting the number of lines in a file

Tizza

Hi All

How would i go about finding how many lines of text there were in a text file ?

say the file is below:

task 5 5 October 2006
task 9 7 October 2006

task 1 9 October 2006

So in the above snippet there are 3 lines obviously. Is it possible to write a REGEX statement that would read a text file for me and return the number of lines there are ?

Thanks!!!

Tizza

a little modification on my original request.....

if i have a file which has times in it. I want to compare the time now with the file. If the time now appears 3 times in the text file, how do i find how many times the time appearred using regex??

the time can be represented by a variable as it is a variable passed through a script for the current time.

Thanks!

scrupul0us


<?php
  $file = "somefile.txt";

  $lines = count(file($file));

  echo "There are $lines lines in $file";
?>

scrupul0us

also time now() isnt going to work since its down to the very second... if u wanna compare dates thats another thing

Tizza

kewl ! i didnt know it was that simple lol

basically what i want is to return how many lines a specific string appears on. so back to my original post, if i wanted to say "how many lines do i see October on?" i would get a value of 3. If i wanted to say "how many lines do i see task 1 in?" i would get a value of 1. etc...

Thanks!

scrupul0us

psedu-code:

-open file and read contents into a variable

-preg_match your condition against the variable containing the file contents

<?php
$subject = file_get_contents($textfile);
$pattern = "";
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);
$count = count($matches);
?>

-->where:
-->subject is the variable containing the text file
-->pattern is your condition
-->matches is the array containg the matching results

-count($matches) will tell you how many occurances there are

this is untested by it will work logically

Tizza

<?php

$file = 'c:\test.txt';
$fh = fopen($file,'r');
$data = fread($fh,filesize($file));
fclose($fh);


//	$subject = file_get_contents($data);
	$pattern = '/(test)\b.*/is';
		preg_match($pattern, $data, $matches);
	$count = count($matches);
echo $count;
print_r($matches);


?>

Output:

C:>c:\php\cli\php.exe -f c:\1.php
2Array
(
[0] => test
test
test
test
12345
12345
12345
12345
[1] => test
)

C:>

the variable $count seems to be just echoing the number of array elements and not how many times the word test appears in the string.

the test.txt document is formatted as follows:

test
test
test
test
12345
12345
12345
12345

I had to echo out the $subject line as it doesnt like my input data 🙂

Tizza

figured it out 🙂

<?php
$file = 'c:\test.txt';
$fh = fopen($file,'r');
$data = fread($fh,filesize($file));
fclose($fh);
	$pattern = '/test/is';
		preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $matches);
	$count = count($matches[0]);
echo $count;
?>

This counts how many times the word test appears in the whole document c:\test.txt

Thanks for all your help scrupul0us 😃

scrupul0us

no problem... glad to help