searching tab delimited file

psuplat

Hello everybody.

I have been handed a rather tricky, if not impossible, task.

I need to run a script that will open a tab delimited txt file, and that find a specific information on it.

Eg. let say the file look like this

aa ab ac ad
ba bb bc bd
ca cb cc cd
da db dc dd

using the below script I can nicely "slice" the file into rows an columns and display a table view:

<?php
$filename = "temp/PriceChg.TXT";
$fd = fopen ($filename, "r");
$contents = fread ($fd,filesize ($filename));

fclose ($fd);
$endofline = "\n";
$delimiter = "\t";
$line = explode($endofline, $contents);
$lncounter = 0;
?>
<br><br>
<font color="blue" face="arial" size="4">Split File Contents</font>
<hr>
<table border="1">
<?
foreach ( $line as $newline )
{

$counter = $lncounter++;
echo "<tr>";

$cell = explode($delimiter, $newline);

foreach ( $cell as $newcell){
echo "<td>".$newcell."</td>";
    }
    echo "</tr>";
}
?>
</table>

but, what I will need to do is to find value of specific "cell" from that list.

something like this:

display value of cell aa if value of cell ad is equal to someValue

if I could operate on database that would be a piece of cake, but I'm limited to files.

Any ideas how to do it?

Thanks

laserlight

There are a few ways to do this. A rather generic way is to read into an array of arrays, then access the various elements at will. But if each row means something (and it probably does), you could create a class to model what that row means, then create objects of that class to populate an array.

psuplat wrote:
if I could operate on database that would be a piece of cake, but I'm limited to files.

Why not use SQLite? It is a database engine that requires no or very little configuration and which uses just one database file. It is probably available to you.