php retrieve data from text file - php

Question

Imagine I have a certain text file like this:
Welcome to the text file!
-------------------------
Description1: value1
Description2: value2
Description containing spaces: value containing spaces
Description3: value3
Storing this data into a text file would be easy, like this:
$file = 'data/preciousdata.txt';
// The new data to add to the file
$put = $somedescription .": ". $somevalue;
// Write the contents to the file,
file_put_contents($file, $put, FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);
With a different description and value every time I write to it.
Now I would like to read the data, so you would get the file:
$myFile = "data/preciousdata.txt";
$lines = file($myFile);//file in to an array
Lets say I just wrote "color: blue" and "taste: spicy" to my text file. I don't know on which lines they are, and I want to retrieve the value of the "color:" description.
Edit
Should I let php "search" though the file, return the number of the line that contains the "description", then put the line in a string and remove everything for the ":"?

Answer 1

With explode you can make an array containg the "description" as a key and the "value" as value.
$myFile = "data.txt";
$lines = file($myFile);//file in to an array
var_dump($lines);
unset($lines[0]);
unset($lines[1]); // we do not need these lines.
foreach($lines as $line)
{
$var = explode(':', $line, 2);
$arr[$var[0]] = $var[1];
}
print_r($arr);

Answer 2

I don't know how you want to use those values later on. You can load data into an associative array, where the descriptions are keys:
// iterate through array
foreach($lines as $row) {
// check if the format of this row is correct
if(preg_match('/^([^:]*): (.*)$/', $row, $matches)) {
// get matched data - key and value
$data[$matches[1]] = $matches[2];
}
}
var_dump($data);
Please note that this code allows you to fetch values with colons.
If you are not sure if the descriptions are unique you can store values as an array:
// iterate through array
foreach($lines as $row) {
// check if the format of this row is correct
if(preg_match('/^([^:]*): (.*)$/', $row, $matches)) {
// get matched data - key and value
$data[$matches[1]][] = $matches[2];
}
}
var_dump($data);
This prevents from overwriting data parsed earlier.

Answer 3

Since $lines is an array, you should loop it looking for the ":" and separating the line in two: description and value.
Then:
<?php
$variables = array();
unset($lines[0]); //Description line
unset($lines[1]); //-------
foreach ($lines as $line) {
$tempArray = explode( ": ", $line ); //Note the space after the ":", because
values are stored with this format.
$variables[$tempArray[0]] = $tempArray[1];
}
?>
There you have in variables an array, whose keys are the descriptions and values are your values.

Answer 4

You could use a regular expression to split the line and retrieve the parte after ":" or just yse the explodecommand which returns an array of the string split by every ":" such as:
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
$split_line = explode(":", $line);
// echo the sencond part of thr string after the first ":"
echo($split_line[1])
// also remove spaces arounfd your string
echo(trim($split_line[1]));
}