Php parsing CSV confusion

[Grafenix]

Hi everyone -

Newbie to PHP.

I'm parsing an ASCII file from my FTP site with PHP and it's working just fine. I want to know if I can get help on scripting to sort the file by current date and limiting the record return. There are over 50 records and I would like to display 8-10 at a time sorted by date and display ONLY the current date.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Here's the sample CSV .txt:

sampleASCII.TXT
AWE,290,COM,,ABQ,12-07-2007 05:16:00,12-07-2007 05:16:00,,LAS,12-07-2007 06:32:00,12-07-2007 06:32:00,,S,01:16
FFT,4835,COM,,DEN,12-07-2007 05:07:00,12-07-2007 05:07:00,,ABQ,12-07-2007 06:07:00,12-07-2007 06:07:00,,S,01:00

Sample PHP code:

<?php
// open XML tags
echo "<?xml version='1.0'?>";
echo "<flightdata>";

// set file to read
$filename = "sampleASCII.txt";

// open file
$fh = fopen ($filename, "r") or die("Could not open file");

// read file
while (!feof($fh))
{
// create XML structure
echo "<schedule>";
$fields = fgetcsv($fh, 1000);
?>
<br />
<table width="1200" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" bordercolor="#666666">
<tr>
<td width="43" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<?php echo "<airline>" . $fields[0] . "</airline> "; ?>
<?php echo "<id>" . $fields[1] . "</id> "; ?>
<?php echo "<depart>" . $fields[4] . "</depart> "; ?>
<?php echo "<time>" . $fields[6] . "</time>"; ?>
</tr>
</table>
<?php echo "</flightdata>";
}

// close file
fclose ($fh);

echo "</schedule>";

?>

[niwa3836]

Hi,

If you have lots of data that will be going in then maybe you should consider slapping into mysql or sql generally and using the sort option in that.

I am a newbie to functions available (maybe more checks at www.php.net?), otherwise good old fashioned sorting in an array is the way.

Have a look at http://mathbits.com/MathBits/CompSci/Arrays/Sorting.htm

as there are lots of sorting methods. Its a slow process and gets worse with the amount of data you have!

Hope this helps.

[Weedpacket]

niwa3836 wrote:

Have a look at .... as there are lots of sorting methods.

But unless you're doing it for your own amusement, it's hard to find a reason to not use PHP's built-in sorting functions (of which there are several, including the canonical [man]sort[/man]).

In this case I think [man]usort[/man], with the comparison function

sort_by_date($a,$b)
{
    $column = /*fill this in with whichever column number represents "the current date" */;
    if($a[$column]<$b[$column]) return -1;
    if($a[$column]>$b[$column]) return 1;
    return 0;
}

After it's been sorted you can limit it. Using [man]array_slice[/man] would be a convenient function here.

[Grafenix]

Thanks so much guys.

In this script.

sort_by_date($a,$b)

What variables do I plu in to $a,$b ?

Thanks.