check text file format

greedyisg00d

I want to create a program where a user uploads a text file and the file is save in a temporary folder in the server. What I want is after successfully uploading the text file it will display if the text file is in tab delimited or comma delimited format. For example:

"You have successfully uploaded a TAB Delimited text file"

Any sample codes that I can work on? Thanks

halojoy

a tab delimited file has a number of this char in each line:
$char = "\t";

a comma delimited file has number of this char in each:
$char = ",";
But comma delimited can also often be:
$char = '","'; // doublequote-comma-doublequote

it is not very difficult to read file line-by-line
and find out how many of those chars is in a line

Such file read functions useful are [man]fgets/man and [man]file/man
- fgets() read one line, so you use a while() loop to get them all
- file() reads in all the lines and put them in an array() of lines
.. then you can loop this array() with foreach()

greedyisg00d

Can you make a sample code out of it? I manage to read each line but I do not know the process of determining if its tab or comma delimited. Here is my sample code

$lines = file('c:\\textfile.txt');

// Loop through our array, show HTML source as HTML source; and line numbers too.
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
    echo "Line #<b>{$line_num}</b> : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";

NogDog

The problem I see is that a CSV file could contain tabs, a tab-delimited file could contain commas, and technically speaking, either could contain neither (if it's a single column). Now, if the file being uploaded is expected to have a specific number of columns, then you could try parsing it as CSV and then tab-delimited to see if it has the correct number of columns in either method.

greedyisg00d

yes the file to be uploaded must always contain 6 columns. So how can I check it? Can you post some sample codes or functions to be used in order to check the number of columns. Thanks

Weedpacket

Count the number of commas and tabs in the first line. If one of them appears five times, then that's the delimiter. If by chance both appear five times, try again with the second line, and so on.

greedyisg00d

In my program I usually read the contents of each column so is there a way to skip reading the first line since its the header of the column and I want to start reading the second line for which its the actual content.

bradgrafelman

greedyisg00d;10945071 wrote:
In my program I usually read the contents of each column so is there a way to skip reading the first line since its the header of the column and I want to start reading the second line for which its the actual content.

Assuming you're using [man]fgetcsv/man, just call the function once without using it's return value, e.g.:

$fp = fopen('foo', 'r');
fgetcsv($fp, 8192, "\t");

while($cols = fgetcsv($fp, 8192, "\t")) {
    // process $cols here; first has been skipped
}