Read a text file and transfer contents to mysql database

Question

I need a php script to read a .txt file.

The content of the text file are like this:

data.txt

145|Joe Blogs|17/03/1954
986|Jim Smith|12/01/1976
234|Paul Jones|19/07/1923
098|James Smith|12/09/1998
234|Carl Jones|01/01/1925

These would then get stored into a database like this

**DataID |Name |DOB **

234    |Carl Jones|01/01/1925

I would be so grateful if someone could give me script to achieve this.

Update:

<?
$handle = @fopen("data.txt", "r");
$conn = mysql_connect("localhost","username","password"); 
mysql_select_db("mydatabase",$conn);
while (!feof($handle)) // Loop til end of file.
{
$buffer = fgets($handle, 4096);
 // Read a line.
list($a,$b,$c)=explode("|",$buffer);
//Separate string by the means of |
echo $a."-".$b."-".$c."<br>";
$sql = "INSERT INTO data_table (iddata, name, age) VALUES('".$a."','".$b."',".$c.")";   
mysql_query($sql,$conn) or die(mysql_error());
}
?>

get the following error error in your SQL syntax; ...for the right syntax to use near ')' at line 1

Answer 1

What you may be looking for is MySQL's built-in function LOAD DATA INFILE to load a text file containing values for a database into a database.

The LOAD DATA INFILE statement reads rows from a text file into a table at a very high speed. The file name must be given as a literal string.

Example:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'data.txt' INTO TABLE my_table;

You could also specify the delimiters inside of your text-file, like so:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'data.txt' INTO TABLE my_table FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|';

Update:

Here is a full-working example, I uploaded a test data file here and here is my PHP code.

$string = file_get_contents("http://www.angelfire.com/ri2/DMX/data.txt", "r");
$myFile = "C:/path/to/myFile.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("Could not open: " . mysql_error());
fwrite($fh, $string);
fclose($fh);

$sql = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "password");
if (!$sql) {
    die("Could not connect: " . mysql_error());
}
mysql_select_db("my_database");
$result = mysql_query("LOAD DATA INFILE '$myFile'" .
                      " INTO TABLE test FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'");
if (!$result) {
    die("Could not load. " . mysql_error());
}

Here what the table looked before running my PHP code:

mysql> select * from test;
+--------+-----------+------------+
| DataID | Name      | DOB        |
+--------+-----------+------------+
|    145 | Joe Blogs | 17/03/1954 |
+--------+-----------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

And here is the result after:

mysql> select * from test;
+--------+-------------+------------+
| DataID | Name        | DOB        |
+--------+-------------+------------+
|    145 | Joe Blogs   | 17/03/1954 |
|    234 | Carl Jones  | 01/01/1925 |
|     98 | James Smith | 12/09/1998 |
|    234 | Paul Jones  | 19/07/1923 |
|    986 | Jim Smith   | 12/01/1976 |
+--------+-------------+------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)