PHP Array Processing Ability Decreases - php

Question

I need help processing files holding about 46k lines or more than 30MB of data.
My original idea was to open the file and turn each line into an array element. This worked the first time as the array held about 32k values total.
The second time, the process was repeated, the array only held 1011 elements, and finally, the third time it could only hold 100.
I'm confused and don't know much about the backend array processes. Can someone explain what is happening and fix the code?
function file_to_array($cvsFile){
$handle = fopen($cvsFile, "r");
$path = fread($handle, filesize($cvsFile));
fclose($handle);
//Turn the file into an array and separate lines to elements
$csv = explode(",", $path);
//Remove common double spaces
foreach ($csv as $key => $line){
$csv[$key] = str_replace(' ', '', str_getcsv($line));
}
array_filter($csv);
//get the row count for the file and array
$rows = count($csv);
$filerows = count(file($cvsFile)); //this no longer works
echo "File has $filerows and array has $rows";
return $csv;
}

Answer 1

The approach here can be split in 2.
Optimized file reading and processing
Proper storage solution
Optimized file processing can be done like so:
$handle = fopen($cvsFile, "r");
$rowsSucceed = 0;
$rowsFailed = 0;
if ($handle) {
while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) { // Reading file by line
// Process CSV line and check if it was parsed correctly
// And count as you go
if (!empty($parsedLine)) {
$csv[$key] = ... ;
$rowsSucceed++;
} else {
$rowsFailed++;
}
}
fclose($handle);
} else {
// Error handling
}
$totalLines = $rowsSucceed + $rowsFailed;
Also you can avoid array_filter() simply by not adding processed line if its empty.
It will allow to optimize memory usage during script execution.
Proper storage
Proper storage here is needed for performing operations on certain amount of data. File reading are ineffective and expensive. Using simple file based database like sqlite can help you a lot and increase overall performance of your script.
For this purpose you probably should process your CSV directly to database and than perform count operation on parsed data avoiding excessive file line counts etc.
Also it gives you further advantage on working with data not keeping it all in memory.

Answer 2

Your question says you want to "turn each line into an array element" but that is definitely not what you are doing. The code is quite clear; it reads the entire file into $path and then uses explode() to make one massive flat array of every element on every line. Then later you're trying to run str_getcsv() on each item, which of course isn't going to work; you've already exploded all the commas away.
Looping over the file using fgetcsv() makes more sense:
function file_to_array($cvsFile) {
$filerows = 0;
$handle = fopen($cvsFile, "r");
while ($line = fgetcsv($handle)) {
$filerows++;
// skip empty lines
if ($line[0] === null) {
continue;
}
//Remove common double spaces
$csv[] = str_replace(' ', '', $line);
}
//get the row count for the file and array
$rows = count($csv);
echo "File has $filerows and array has $rows";
fclose($handle);
return $csv;
}