fields in text files

Anon

I'm reading from already-made text file, which has fileds spederated by tabs (\t), but PHP recognize only the first word of each fields as the string, instead of all the words until next field.

Here is how i'm reading a line in the current program:
fscanf ($fp, "%s\t%s\t%s\n", &$file, &$title, &$comment);

How can I fix it? What do I need to change in the program, to make it work well?

Anon

oh, I've forgot, the textfile has some follows tab (i.e., \t\t\t), to justify each fields, so it will be readable to humans, whom read that file(s).

Thanks in advance.

Anon

Hi Tomer,
either ur question is not so clear or I am not getting it 🙁 ..
I have been played with File systems 😉 so if you could clear ur question, I could help you..

regards
tabish

Anon

You need to make the text file machine-readable.

The problem is that sometimes consecutive tabs will mean empty columns and sometimes they will mean justified columns. After you fix that, you should be able to read the file reliably using a program.

Anon

I'm meaning that I have a textfile, and I want to read that file from the PHP code.

The file is something like
Field11 \t field21 \t Filed31
Field12 \t\t Field22 \t filed32

(While \t is a tab key...)

my problem is that with the currect fscanf line, I gets only the first word of each field, instad of the whole text of that field, until next tab or newline.

Anon

Not always. It's easy to make a code that will put null on the upcoming fields, if the line terminated with newline, and also to put a null if the field equal to "null". And even it's possible to put  on empty fields, so the user will see nothing.

kparker

If the text file uses tab in more than one way (delimiter + alignment) then a simple fscanf() (or a split() or explode()) can't possibly determine which is which. Your only hope would be that the extra tabs were put in carefully to make the columns align perfectly at a given tab stop, in which case you could read in the entire line as a string, detab it, and then parse the fields based on their column positions.

Anon

Hi Tomer,
Do it in easy way ..

//put your file in an Array
$file=file("readfile.txt");
$count=count($file);
for($i=0;$i<$count;$i++)
{
//split your each line with TAB
//insted of list you can use an Undefined Array too, if you are not sure about the length of string

list($var1,$var2,$var3)=split("\t",$file[$i]);
echo($var1."<br>");
echo($var2."<br>");
echo($var3."<br>");
}

hope this will help..Have fun..🙂

Regards
Tabish