Parsing two files, and comparing strings - php

Question

So I have two files, formatted like this:
First file
adam 20 male
ben 21 male
Second file
adam blonde
adam white
ben blonde
What I would like to do, is use the instance of adam in the first file, and search for it in the second file and print out the attributes.
Data is seperated by tab "\t", so this is what I have so far.
$firstFile = fopen("file1", "rb"); //opens first file
$i=0;
$k=0;
while (!feof($firstFile) ) { //feof = while not end of file
$firstFileRow = fgets($firstFile); //fgets gets line
$parts = explode("\t", $firstFileRow); //splits line into 3 strings using tab delimiter
$secondFile= fopen("file2", "rb");
$countRow = count($secondFile); //count rows in second file
while ($i<= $countRow){ //while the file still has rows to search
$row = fgets($firstFile); //gets whole row
$parts2 = explode("\t", $row);
if ($parts[0] ==$parts2[0]){
print $parts[0]. " has " . $parts2[1]. "<br>" ; //prints out the 3 parts
$i++;
}
}
}
I cant figure out how to loop through the second file, get each row, and compare to the first file.

Answer 1

You have a typo in the inner loop, you are reading firstfile and should be reading second file. In addition, after exiting inner loop you would want to re-wind the secondfile pointer back to the beginning.

Answer 2

How about this:
function file2array($filename) {
$file = file($filename);
$result = array();
foreach ($file as $line) {
$attributes = explode("\t", $line);
foreach (array_slice($attributes, 1) as $attribute)
$result[$attributes[0]][] = $attribute;
}
return $result;
}
$a1 = file2array("file1");
$a2 = file2array("file2");
print_r(array_merge_recursive($a1, $a2));
It will ouput the following:
Array (
[adam] => Array (
[0] => 20
[1] => male
[2] => blonde
[3] => white
)
[ben] => Array (
[0] => 21
[1] => male
[2] => blonde
)
)
However this one reads both files in one piece and will crash, if they are large ( >100MB). On the other hand 90% of all php programs have this problem, since file() is popular :-)