[RESOLVED] substr Counting Line Breaks

perpetualshaun

I have a data migration script to pull data from our old schema into the new one, and the old comments are broke across two separate fields. I had this code:

$comments_part_1 = substr($response[$comment['comment_lbl']],0,6800);
$comments_part_2 = substr($response[$comment['comment_lbl']],6800);

However, I found that $comments_part_1 ends up being more than 6800 characters since there are a lot of line breaks in some of the comments. So my insert statement ends up being more than 6800 characters for that field, and I get an error in MySQL when I try to insert it. And of course I'm losing / missing data in this scenario as well.

I did some searches before I posted here, but couldn't find what I need to get this working. Anyone out there know how I can account for the line breaks (\r\n) in the substr functions above? Doing a preg_replace before and after I do the substr could work too, if that's the best / easiest way to make this work.

dalecosp

Are you quite certain you want to lose the formatting?

perpetualshaun

I definitely don't want to lose the formatting. I just want to count it with the substr function. Once the \r\n characters are added into the MySQL insert statement, then it's over the 6800 characters.

Derokorian

I think there is something else going on, substr definitely counts the escape sequences in its character count.

$str = "abc\r\ndef\r\nghi";
var_dump(substr($str, 0, 6));

Outputs:

string(6) "abc
d"

Notice only 4 letters, because there are 2 escape characters (notably, carriage return + newline) that substr counted as well.

Weedpacket

Whether you count linebreaks or not, the length of the whole string won't actually change; if it's too long to fit in the database field before you count newlines it will still be too long afterwards.

But as far as actually counting substrings goes, see [man]substr_count[/man].