Dealing with commas in CSV

Question

I get a CSV data from a SOAP call in php. Unfortunately, the data may have commas in it. It is formatted correctly as in

1,name,2,lariat,3,"first, last",5,NMEA,...

I need to parse it to individual values in either php or javascript. I have browsed through threads on stack overflow and elsewhere but have not found a specific solution in php / javascript.

The approach I am currently using is

$subject = '123,name,456,lryyrt,123213,"first,last",8585,namea3';
$pattern = '/,|,"/';
$t2=preg_replace ('/,|(".*")/','$0*',$subject);
$t2=str_replace(',','*',$t2);
$t2=str_replace('*',',',$t2);

Where * is the deliminator, but the preg_replace generates an extra *. I have tried a couple of other approaches involving preg_match and other preg_ functions but did not succeed in having any kind of a clean split.

Any suggestion on how to split up CSV data that contains commas in it?

Answer 1

Don't attempt to do this with a regular expression. Just use str_getcsv()! The third parameter informs str_getcsv() to look for quote-enclosed fields.

$subject = '123,name,456,lryyrt,123213,"first,last",8585,namea3';
$array = str_getcsv($subject, ",", '"');

print_r($array);
// Prints:
Array
(
    [0] => 123
    [1] => name
    [2] => 456
    [3] => lryyrt
    [4] => 123213
    [5] => first,last
    [6] => 8585
    [7] => namea3
)