Help parsing a log file.

[Anon]

I'm trying to parse a logfile generated on my BSD machine. I've gotten PHP to iterate through the log file one line at a time without problem, however I'm running into a problem where the spaces in each line aren't actually spaces, and I don't know how to find out what control code there actually is.

print $buffer yields:
field1 field2 field3

However, doing:
$args = explode(" ",$buffer);
print $args[0];

yields the same thing:
field1 field2 field3

I've tried doing regexps to strip the extra spaces, but it doesn't hit because whatever it is that is seperating the characters isn't a space. I've tried for \s as well with no luck. Any help?

[Anon]

If they are not spaces, it is possible that they are tabs... You could try this:

$lines = file("logfile");
foreach($lines as $num => $data)
{
   $fields = explode("\t",$data);
   echo $fields[0];
}

If they are not tabs, I'm not sure what they are...

[Anon]

That's exactly what they were! Thank you so much for the help.