Help me parse this file with PHP

Question

Fri Nov 27 10:00:01 EST 2009         974        12506
Fri Nov 27 11:00:01 EST 2009         988        12655
Fri Nov 27 12:00:01 EST 2009        1005        12886
Fri Nov 27 13:00:01 EST 2009        1026        13115
Fri Nov 27 14:00:01 EST 2009        1042        13429

I tried to explode on \n and then \t, but it looks like there are no tabs in the file...

Answer 1

It appears to be fixed column width. You're going to need to either:

• Use substr() and extract each column, then trim whitespace
• Use preg_split() and look for two or more spaces in a row '/\s+/'
• Other

Explode will likely return a bunch of empty elements, since it only matches a single character / one space.

Answer 2

This'll split at all whitespace collections, regardless of size.

$lines = file($myfile);
foreach ($lines as $line) {
    $line = preg_split('/\s+/', $line);
    # do stuff with line
}

Answer 3

$lines = explode( "\r\n", $str );

foreach( $lines as $line){

echo 'date = ' .  substr( $line, 0 , 28) . PHP_EOL;
echo 'var1 =  ' . substr( $line, 28 , 12) . PHP_EOL;
echo 'var2 =  ' . substr( $line, 40 , 12) . PHP_EOL;
echo '
 ' ;

}

If possible PHP treats all incoming vars as an integer first of all, so if the text files are of predictable length ( 24, 12, 12 Chars that I can see) then 0000000974 will be correctly parsed as being the integer 974 without having to resort to trim.

Isn't it alway best to aviod regexes if you can?

Answer 4

$line = "Fri Nov 27 10:00:01 EST 2009         974        12506";
preg_match_all('~\S+~', $line, $parts);
print_r($parts[0]);

the rest is up to you