How to extract specific text from a text file in php? - php

Question

i am having difficulties with extracting specific text from a text file. I have tried many different ways like using fopen or file to open the file but this wont allow me to use any of the string functions. So i have decided to use file_get_contents and extract the text i want with the string methods as follows:
<?php
$data = [];
$file =
file_get_contents("data.txt", 0, NULL, 148);
list($id, $data_names) = preg_split('[:]', $file);
array_push($names, $data_names);
echo $emails[0];
?>
I used preg_split to split the text i want at a specific character (:) and i put the data in an array. Which worked for the first line but i don't know how to go about doing it for the rest of the lines, i've tried a while loop but that just ends up in an infinite loop.
data.txt formatted like this:
1:hannah.Smith
2:Bob.jones
3:harry.white
....
Any suggestions on how to do this or a better approach would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There is a function for that. This isn't CSV but change the delimiter. To just get the names:
$handle = fopen("data.txt", "r"));
while(($line = fgetcsv($handle, 0, ":")) !== FALSE) {
$names[] = $line[1];
}
To index the names by the ids:
while(($line = fgetcsv($handle, 0, ":")) !== FALSE) {
$names[$line[0]] = $line[1];
}
To get the ids and names in a multidimensional array, use:
while(($names[] = fgetcsv($handle, 0, ":")) !== FALSE) {}

Answer 2

Well you are not assigning the return value of file_get_contents to a variable. So the contents of the file are not being used.
You can use the file function. It reads the contents of a file to an array. Each element of the array is a line in the file. You can then loop over the array and parse each line. For example:
$names = array();
$file = file_get_contents("data.txt");
for ($count = 0; $count < count($file); $count++) {
list($id, $name) = $file[$count];
$names[] = $name;
}
/** print the contents of the names array */
print_R($names);