Is it possible to get a resource handle from file data? - php

Question

I currently have a function that takes a csv file, and returns an array of the data from it. I want to minimally alter this function to take the file data instead of the file itself.
Using the following code, I would like to get a resource handle from the passed in data, instead of from a file so that I can keep the rest of the function the same. Is this possible?
public function returnRawCSVData($filepath, $separator = ',')
{
$file = fopen($filepath, 'r');
$csvrawdata = array();
//I WANT TO CHANGE $filepath to $file_data and get a resource from it to pass into fgetcsv below.
while( ($row = fgetcsv($file, $this->max_row_size, $separator, $this->enclosure)) != false ) {
if( $row[0] != null ) { // skip empty lines
}
}
fclose($file);
return $csvrawdata;
}

Answer 1

It seems you're looking for a way to create a new file resource from the source text?
If so, you can create a file resource in-memory like so:
/**
* Return an in-memory file resource handle from source text
* #param string $csvtxt CSV source text
* #return resource File resource handle
*/
public static function getFileResourceFromSrcTxt($csvtxt)
{
$tmp_handle = fopen('php://temp', 'r+');
fwrite($tmp_handle, $csvtxt);
return $tmp_handle;
}
/**
* Parse csv data from source text
* #param $file_data CSV source text
* #see self::getFileResourceFromSrcTxt
*/
public function returnRawCSVData($file_data, $separator = ',')
{
$file = self::getFileResourceFromSrcTxt($file_data);
$csvrawdata = array();
while( ($row = fgetcsv($file, $this->max_row_size, $separator, $this->enclosure)) != false ) {
if( $row[0] != null ) { // skip empty lines
// do stuff
}
}
fclose($file);
}
It's worth noting that you can also use "php://memory" in place of "php://temp" -- the difference being that 'memory' ONLY stores things in memory while 'temp' will store something in memory until it reaches a given size (the default is 2 MB), then transparently switch to the filesystem.
Find out more about what the php docs say on this topic ...

Answer 2

If you're trying to pass around file handles, you can treat them as such:
$in_file = fopen('some_file.csv', 'r');
// Do stuff with input...
// Later, pass the file handle to a function and let it read from the file too.
$data = doStuffWithFile($in_file);
fclose($in_file);
function doStuffWithFile($file_handle)
{
$line = fgetcsv($file_handle);
return $line;
}