Formatting text file

joane1

Hi!
i have some data exactly as below:

country 
town
monument

france
paris
eiffel

usa
newyork
manatthan
...

I need to format as below:

country town monument
france paris eiffel
usa newyork manatthan

How can I obtain this result?

Thanks!

laserlight

Read the contents of the file then print it in the desired format. Reading can be done line by line in this case, so it is quite trivial.

joane1

i use this code:

$news=fopen("d.txt","r"); 
while (!feof($news)) {
$buffer = fgets($news, 4096);
echo $buffer;
}
fclose ($news);

but the result is always as my first formatting

laserlight

Why is the result always as your first formatting?

I know why, I'm just asking you to stop and think about what your code snippet is doing.

joane1

due to I can't find the mistake I posted this problem...

bradgrafelman

All your code is doing is displaying the file contents exactly as is. You aren't doing any processing to re-arrange the data. Think about how you would do this step-by-step if you weren't using a program to do it. How would you do it?

One way might be:

Read the file line-by-line. Note you can either do it as you are now or by using [man]file/man (which would negate the second step below altogether).
Store each line (an [man]array[/man] might be a good choice) until you have the data on three lines.
Output the group of three lines' data in the format you specified above (e.g. separated by a space and ending with a line break).
If you didn't use [man]file/man, go back to step #2. Otherwise, go back to step #3.

laserlight

Okay, let me explain what your code does, by writing an explanatory comment before each significant line:

// Open "d.txt" for reading, assigning the file pointer to $news
$news = fopen("d.txt", "r"); 
// while the end of the file associated with $news has not been reached
while (!feof($news)) {
// Read a line of up to 4096 bytes from the file into $buffer
$buffer = fgets($news, 4096);
    // Print the line read
    echo $buffer;
}
// Close the file
fclose($news);

Therefore, you are not doing anything to treat each tuple of country, town and monument differently from any other set of lines. You are just reading and dumping what was read onto the page. Therefore, there is no formatting done, so the format of the output is the format of the input.

A simple solution here is to observe that for every three lines read from the file, you want to print them as a single line, separated by spaces. The blank line that follows is then ignored. Hence, you can use a counter, e.g.,

$line_count = 0;
while (($buffer = fgets($news, 4096)) !== false) {
    ++$line_count;
    // Every 4th line is blank, so only process the rest:
    if ($line_count % 4 != 0) {
        echo rtrim($buffer);
        if ($line_count % 3 == 0) {
            echo "<br />\n";
        } else {
            echo ' ';
        }
    }
}

NogDog

Another option would be to use empty lines as delimiters of a sort:

<pre>
<?php
while (!feof($news)) {
    $buffer = fgets($news, 4096);
    if(trim($buffer) !== '') {
        echo $buffer;
    }
    else {
        echo PHP_EOL;
    }
}
?>
</pre>

joane1

laserlight;11028183 wrote:
A simple solution here is to observe that for every three lines read from the file, you want to print them as a single line, separated by spaces. The blank line that follows is then ignored. Hence, you can use a counter, e.g.,
$line_count = 0;
while (($buffer = fgets($news, 4096)) !== false) {
    ++$line_count;
    // Every 4th line is blank, so only process the rest:
    if ($line_count % 4 != 0) {
        echo rtrim($buffer);
        if ($line_count % 3 == 0) {
            echo "<br />\n";
        } else {
            echo ' ';
        }
    }
}

whit this code the output is:

france paris eiffel
usa newyork
manatthan italy
rome colosseum

NogDog;11028195 wrote:
Another option would be to use empty lines as delimiters of a sort:
<pre>
<?php
while (!feof($news)) {
    $buffer = fgets($news, 4096);
    if(trim($buffer) !== '') {
        echo $buffer;
    }
    else {
        echo PHP_EOL;
    }
}
?>
</pre>

with this code all is shown as string: france paris eiffel usa newyork manatthan italy rome colosseum.

Where I make the mistake?

NogDog

joane1;11028203 wrote:
with this code all is shown as string: france paris eiffel usa newyork manatthan italy rome colosseum.

Where I make the mistake?

Did you include the <pre> tags around the output so that the newlines are respected by the browser? (Or, if you don't want to use <pre> tags, add whatever HTML you want, maybe just a <br /> tag?)

laserlight

joane1 wrote:
whit this code the output is:

france paris eiffel
usa newyork
manatthan italy
rome colosseum

Oh, my mistake: I forgot that the line breaks should not be inserted at multiples of three, but rather the line before the point of multiples of four. You should be able to fix that if you understand what the code is doing.