Parsing A Data Feed

Question

I'm not the best at PHP and would be extremely grateful if somebody could help. Basically I need to parse each line of a datafeed and just get each bit of information between each "|" - then I can add it to a database. I think I can handle getting the information from between the "|"'s by using explode but I need a bit of help with parsing each line from a text file as a singular. Infact to make it even more simple, I just need it to use each line of a variable, I will submit content to the variable using a textarea and a form. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can read a file into an array of lines and do all the splitting with:

$lines = file("filename");
foreach($lines as $line) {
    $parts = explode("|", $line);
    // do the database inserts here
}

If you already have all the text in a variable as you said (e.g., with something like file_get_contents() ), you can explode on \n first and then do the same foreach statement as above.

Answer 2

If you are reading out of your textarea post, you can use the explode function using the newline character as your separator to get each "line" in the variable as a new element of an array, then you can do explode on your array elements.

i.e.

$sometext = "balh | balh blah| more blah \n extra balh |some blah |this blah";

$lines = explode("\n", $sometext);
foreach($lines as $oneLine)
{
    $lineElements[] = explode("|", $oneLine);
}

then you have a 2d array of your elems.

If you are reading out of a file, you can simply use the file function documented here:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

to get each line of the file as an element of an array.