Creating a bank file (blank spaces!)

jonki

I am having trouble with what should be a fairly simple creation of a file I can upload in my banks homepage to bill my clients. There are strict rules governing the format and I have to create a txt file, each line of the text file has to be exaclty 162 characters in length with the specific details of each part in exactly the correct place or the bank can't read it.

Here is part of the file I am trying to create

echo '5180x1771028M000',$fecha,'      ',str_pad($nombre, 40, " ", STR_PAD_LEFT),'                    ','20650103','                                                                  ';
 ?> <br>
<? 
echo "5380X1771028M000"."$fecha"."$nombre_pres"."20650103853000000000"."        "."01"."                                                                ";
?> <br>

The problem I am having is that when I view my php file, all the blank spaces I have carefully created disappear. I have tried using   in the str_pad function but it does not work.

What I am planning to do is to call this page from another php page like this;

$data = file_get_contents("http://www.tenercoche.com/fichero.php"); 	
	//	$mes = date("mY"); 

//	$ficha="$mes".".txt"; 
//	$fp = fopen("$ficha", "w") or die("------------Could not open file ---------");
//	fputs($fp,"$data");  

//	fclose($fp);

Am I over complicating this simple process?

Many thanks!!!

jonki

OK - I have managed to to this with underscores. It will look ugly on the bank statements but will work.

I have a question; Is there any reason why the str_pad() would put 1 padding too little?

I have this code

echo '5680',str_pad($dni, 12, "0", STR_PAD_RIGHT),str_pad($id, 12, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT),str_pad($nombre, 40, "_", STR_PAD_BOTH),$cuenta,str_pad($importe, 10, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT),'________________',str_pad($concepto, 40, "_", STR_PAD_LEFT),'________'; 
     		echo "<br>";

And it works perfeclty every singly time except for my 78th and 92nd entry. There is nothing similar between these two entries.

It is this part the goes wrong; ,str_pad($nombre, 40, "_", STR_PAD_BOTH), It puts 39 characters instead of 40.

Bizzare huh?

brianadkins

HTML dictates that browsers will collapes all contigous spaces into a single one. Try using the <pre> tag to preserve space formatting...

<?php

echo "this is a      test<br>";
echo "<pre>this is a      test</pre>";

?>

jonki

Many many thanks. Never knew that existed.