Use PHP to convert text file into array - php

Question

I have a text file here which I need to be able to convert into rows to extract the second, third, fourth, and fifth values from.
The first 7 values of each row are tab delimited, then there is a newline, then the final three values are tab delimited.
I removed the interrupting newlines so that each row is fully tab delimited.
<?php
$file="140724.txt";
$fopen = fopen($file, "r");
$fread = fread($fopen,filesize("$file"));
fclose($fopen);
$remove = "\n";
split = explode($remove, $fread);
foreach ($split as $string)
{
echo "$string<br><br>";
}
?>
Which produces this.
I'm not sure where to progress from this point. I'm teaching myself PHP and am still quite new to it, so I don't even know if where I've started from is a good place. My instinct is to write the previous output to a new textfile, then create another block of code similar to the first but exploding based on tabs, this time.
Help?

Answer 1

You can process this file in one go like this:
<?php
$file="140724.txt";
$fopen = fopen($file, 'r');
$fread = fread($fopen,filesize($file));
fclose($fopen);
$remove = "\n";
$split = explode($remove, $fread);
$array[] = null;
$tab = "\t";
foreach ($split as $string)
{
$row = explode($tab, $string);
array_push($array,$row);
}
echo "<pre>";
print_r($array);
echo "</pre>";
?>
The result will be a jagged array:
You will need to clean up the 1st and the last element.

Answer 2

That is structured data, delimited by tabs. You can use fgetcsv() to read that data into an array. For an example see the PHP documentation.

Answer 3

<?php
$myfile = fopen("test.txt", "r") or die("Unable to open file!");
// Output one line until end-of-file
while(!feof($myfile)) {
$text[] = fgets($myfile);
}
fclose($myfile);
print_r($text);
?>

Answer 4

There is another answer here which converts file/raw strings into an associative array. It is really very handy in such cases.
function tab_to_array($src='', $delimiter=',', $is_file = true)
{
if($is_file && (!file_exists($src) || !is_readable($src)))
return FALSE;
$header = NULL;
$data = array();
if($is_file){
if (($handle = fopen($src, 'r')) !== FALSE)
{
while (($row = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, $delimiter)) !== FALSE)
{
if(!$header)
$header = $row;
else
$data[] = array_combine($header, $row);
}
fclose($handle);
}
}
else{
$strArr = explode("\n",$src);
foreach($strArr as $dataRow){
if($row = explode($delimiter,$dataRow))
{
if(!$header)
$header = $row;
else
$data[] = array_combine($header, $row);
}
}
}
return $data;
}
/**
* Example for file
*/
print_r(tab_to_array('example.csv'));
/**
* Example for raw string
*/
$str = "name number
Lorem 11
ipsum 22";
print_r(tab_to_array($str, "\t", false));