nested file loop

c_tcp_ip

Hi everyone, given a uploaded file I'm trying to remove some duplicate entries from it by running it against another file. I'm completeley new to PHP and to be quite honest i'm just hacking together code so I'm not sure of the most elegant way to do this.

the pseudo code would be something like:

entry =0
iterate through uploaded file:
    iterate through duplicate file:
    entry == duplicate file entry?
      do this:
      else do that;
   next duplicate file entry

next entry

I actually did this in C but have no idea of the data structures to use in PHP. here is my really horrible PHP code. Please be gentle

    

while(!feof($records)){
    //get the line from the file
    $record = fgets($records);    

    //put the record in an array so we can access via index
    $line_data = explode(",",$record);    

	  /*get data from suppression file and compare with this record*/
	  while(!feof($supFile)){   

        $suppression_num = fgets($supFile);        

        echo "uploaded data: ".$line_data[6] "and" . $suppression_num . "</br>";                  

      }//end of inner while
}//end of  outer while

the problem is it only runs through the suppression file once and only one entry from the records file. Any help would be appreciated as it's late and I've been bothering myself with it for awhile tonight.
thank you 🙂

bradgrafelman

Can you explain a little more about how this "suppression file" is used? What does it look like?

EDIT: Also, if you've got a working C implementation, feel free to post that for clarification as well.

c_tcp_ip

bradgrafelman;10977041 wrote:
Can you explain a little more about how this "suppression file" is used? What does it look like?

EDIT: Also, if you've got a working C implementation, feel free to post that for clarification as well.

Hey, thanks for replying. okay so the suppression file just has a list of strings in it, in this case phone numbers. the idea is to iterate through the given file and find out if that number is in the "suppression file", if it is, then flag it.

here is part of the C code I wrote. As you can see when given two files I just allocated the files to some structs and then worked on the structs for removing the duplicates I wanted. Once done, i just wrote the records i wanted back to the file.

      /*start from the first record in the lead file ....*/
      for(record_ndx=0;record_ndx<recs;record_ndx++){
        /*for each record print it...*/
        fprintf(outfile,"%s,",lead_file[record_ndx].phone_digit);
        fprintf(stdout,"Checking record: %ld\r",record_ndx+1);
        /*...and compare against each num in suppression list...*/
          for(dup_count=0;dup_count<sups;dup_count++){
            /*...for each number if it compares and is equal......*/
               if( (strcmp(lead_file[record_ndx].phone_digit,sup_file[dup_count].phone_digit))==0) 
             times++;
           }//end of for loop

  /*next record...but before that print out how many times it appeared in file*/
    fprintf(outfile,"Duplicated %ld times\n",times);
    dupes_in_file+=times;
    times=0;/*reset the occurance of that particular duplicate*/
 }/*end of all records being checked in for loop*/

I know I'm just "thinking in C" and i'm sure there is a easier way to do this in php. 😉

bradgrafelman

In the suppression file, are the phone numbers separated by line breaks, e.g. the file is just a bunch of rows of phone numbers? If so, note that you could load the phone numbers into an array using [man]file/man, e.g.:

$bad_numbers = file('suppression_file.txt');

Next, you used explode() on the uploaded file's data in your PHP implementation above; is this because the uploaded file is in CSV format? If so, note that you could use [man]fgetcsv/man instead of [man]fgets/man for a simpler, more robust method of reading in CSV data as an array.

Finally, as you're looping through the uploaded file, you can use [man]in_array/man to determine if the given value is contained within the array of numbers to suppress.

c_tcp_ip

wow, Thank you very much bradgrafelman. I'm going to look into this and see how it all works. Thank you for responding again.

c_tcp_ip

Hi, sorry to take so long to reply. I changed the code a bit and implemented some of your suggestions. My problem now seems to be the equality operator as I'm sure i'm using it incorrectly, but the code doesn't seem to check for equality. it iterates through both files fine however.

$bad_numbers = file('suppression.csv');   

/*for each record itterate through the suppresion file to find a match and flag it*/
    while(!feof($records)){
    //get the line from the file
	  $record = fgets($records);  

    //put the record in an array so we can access via index
    $line_data = explode(",",$record);     

    $record_num+=1;
	  /*iterate through the whole suppression array and compare each with current record_num*/
	  foreach($bad_numbers as $duplicate){  

    [color="red"]  if (( $line_data[6] == $duplicate) ){ //the number field in array       

          echo $record_num. ": ". $line_data[6]. " is a duplicate with: ". $duplicate. "</br>";          

      }//end of if[/color]
	 }//end of foreach	                 

}//end of while

johanafm

$line_data[6] == $duplicate

does compare equality. Echo both parts out before the if check to inspect their contents, and enclose the output strings in quotes to make certain one doesn't contain whitespaces not present in the other.

printf('"&#37;s" == "%s"%s', $line_data[6], $duplicate,PHP_EOL);

c_tcp_ip

thanks for replying. I did use a print statement before to check what was being printed - both in the uploaded file and the 'suppression' file - and I'm also aware of the contents of the file and I'm certain there are no white spaces. I tried using in_array() as well, but it keeps timing out. so I think I'm just going to use SQL instead to tag and just return the values I want. If there is something else I'm missing though please let me know.
Thanks,