Script to trim 7 columns to 5 ( csv file ) - php

Question

How can I trim these 7 columns down to 5 columns, by running some script of sorts.
I recall you can do this using regex / php but buggered if I can recall how we did it.
Example code ( of a GEO IP db ( 115,000 lines )
"3231296768","3231297023","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231297024","3231297279","ripencc","441763200","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231297280","3231297535","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231297536","3231297791","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231297792","3231298047","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231298048","3231298303","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
"3231298304","3231298559","ripencc","702518400","EU","EU","European Union"
I need to remove columns 3 and 4 from every line.
Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

While jimw's answer is the best answer in general, if you want a pure PHP solution I would suggest the following:
$input = 'input.txt';
$output = 'output.txt';
if (false !== ($ih = fopen($input, 'r'))) {
$oh = fopen($output, 'w');
while (false !== ($data = fgetcsv($ih))) {
// this is where you build your new row
$outputData = array($data[0], $data[1], $data[4], $data[5], $data[6]);
fputcsv($oh, $outputData);
}
fclose($ih);
fclose($oh);
}

Answer 2

From 'a script of sorts' and 'regex/PHP', I infer that you just want this done, and don't care what language is used. If you're on *nix:
cut -d, -f1,2,5,6,7 file.csv
'cut' is a standard unix command-line utility, found on everything from OS X to AIX. The arguments I've used are:
-d, # this sets the 'delimiter' to a comma, for CSV
-f1,2,5,6,7 # this selects which fields to print
So together, it takes a file where each line consists of fields separated by commas and prints out fields one to five of it.
The same effect can be achieved in any programming language. I don't know PHP very well, so I won't attempt to produce it in PHP.
Edit: From the PHP docs, adapted slightly:
function apply_quotes($string) {
return '"'.$string.'"';
}
$row = 1;
if (($handle = fopen("test.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
$data = array_map("apply_quotes", $data);
echo join(",", array($data[0], $data[1], $data[4], $data[5], $data[6]))."\n";
}
fclose($handle);
}