PhP coding - A question which is likely obvious to anyone who has done this a lot

tbloxham

Hey all

So, I'm doing some coding for a website I maintain at work, and usually it's just simple stuff but I want to add a new feature. It requires me to be able to take the list of numbers which look like this in an external txt file...

4 100 1
5 104 1
6 11 1
15 109 1

and convert them in php to be....

$test = array();
$test[4][100]=1;
$test[5][104]=1;
$test[6][11]=1;
$test[15][109]=1;

Any thoughts? I'm sure it should be simple, it would certainly be trivial in C or Fortran.

edit - Oh, and the numbers in the external file are seperated by tabs, at least for now. Primarily I just need a way that I can have a place to save some variables in a logical place which are created during a session using the website, and then load them back in when you come back to it.

Jimmy King

I would look at these two functions:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgets.php

Basically, read the file line by line. Split each line into its own little array. Use that array to populate each row of your final array.

Or you could use sqlite to store that info between sessions.

SeñorAmor

I would use file_get_contents() to read the file. Then I would use explode() with a newline (\n) as a delimiter to create an array whose elements are each of the lines of the file. Finally, I would use a combination of list() and explode() within a foreach block to separate the individual items and use the resulting variables to populate your array.

I can write the code for you, but I'm hesitant to in case this is homework or something.

*Edit, reading further, I see this is for a website you're working on and not homework so here you go:

<?php

// Path to file
$filename = '/path/to/file';

// Open file and save contents
$contents = file_get_contents($filename) or die('Cannot open file!');

// Split file contents into array based on newline
$array = explode("\n", $contents);

// Loop over array elements
foreach ($array as $k => $v)
{
	// Assign variables split on tabs
	list($one, $two, $three) = explode("\t", $v);
	
	// Assign data to big array
	$newarray[$one][$two] = $three;
}

?>

tbloxham

Thanks a lot! Now my excluded samples list will be much easier to make and I won't need to write php pipeline code.