how to read in file in lines of three? - php

Question

So, say you have a php post script that appends whatever you pass to it to a text file as a new line
Let say the file is called file.txt and looks like this:
11:45 Am
12:49 PM
Went to Lunch
3:25 PM
I wanna know, how can I write a php script that treats information as pairs of 3.
so in a for loop it would display
line1 | line2 | line3
line4
Notice that there is nothing past line4, so it stopped.

Answer 1

You can use (demo)
$chunksOfThree = array_chunk(file('/path/to/file', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES), 3);
foreach ($chunksOfThree as $chunk) {
echo implode(' | ', $chunk), PHP_EOL;
}
This will output the desired
11:45 Am | 12:49 PM | Went to Lunch
3:25 PM
See the Manual entries for
file — Reads entire file into an array and
array_chunk — Split an array into chunks
implode — Join array elements with a string

Answer 2

fgets reads an entire line from the file. It is slower than something like fread but does what you want.
You can also use the file function to read the whole file into an array. Each element in the array corresponds to a line in the file.
If the number of lines read is not a multiple of 3, just ignore the last 1 or 2 lines.
fgets returns false if there is no more data so you can check that to determine if one of the triplet entries is incomplete.
while(!feof($fp)) {
$line1 = fgets($fp);
$line2 = fgets($fp);
$line3 = fgets($fp);
if ($line2 === false) {
echo "$line1";
} else if ($line3 == false) {
echo "$line1 | $line2";
} else {
echo "$line1 | $line2 | $line3\n";
}

Answer 3

You can use this code for this
<?php
$filename = "test.txt";
$fp = fopen( $filename, "r" ) or die("Couldn't open $filename");
$i=0;
while ( ! feof( $fp ) ) {
$line = fgets( $fp, 1024 );
if($i==2)
{
print "$line";
$i=0;
print "<br>";
}
else
{
print "$line | ";
$i++;
}
}
?>
Output :
11:45 Am | 12:49 PM | Went to Lunch
3:25 PM |