1. Advertising
    y u no do it?

    Advertising (learn more)

    Advertise virtually anything here, with CPM banner ads, CPM email ads and CPC contextual links. You can target relevant areas of the site and show ads based on geographical location of the user if you wish.

    Starts at just $1 per CPM or $0.10 per CPC.

Using line breaks as a delimiter with 'explode'?

Discussion in 'PHP' started by Kerosene, Sep 1, 2007.

0
  1. #1
    I have a plain old text file on my server with a different word on each line - e.g:
    cat
dog
banana
monkey
    Code (markup):
    I'll pulling this text file into my script and want to explode it at each new line.
    But this isn't working...

    $textfile = './blabla.txt'; 
$words = explode('\n', file_get_contents($textfile));
    Code (markup):
    Any ideas why?
    I've also tried \r, but that didn't work.
     
    Kerosene, Sep 1, 2007 IP
  2. sea otter

    sea otter Peon

    Messages:
    250
    Likes Received:
    23
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #2
    You can use the file() function to read each line (word, in your case) into an array element. One of the flags to file() tells it to strip trailing newlines.

    However, this doesn't always work under Windows, so you need to post-filter the array to right trim whitespace from each element.

    It's easier than it sounds:

    
$words = file('./blabla.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);
$words = array_map('rtrim',$words);
    PHP:
     
    sea otter, Sep 1, 2007 IP
    Kerosene likes this.
  3. Kerosene

    Kerosene Alpha & Omega™ Staff

    Messages:
    11,366
    Likes Received:
    575
    Best Answers:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    385
    #3
    Wow! Looks like I should do some reading on the file function, I never knew it could do things like that. Thanks :)
     
    Kerosene, Sep 1, 2007 IP
  4. sea otter

    sea otter Peon

    Messages:
    250
    Likes Received:
    23
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #4
    No problem.

    file() is one of several oddly and misleadingly named functions in php. It's something you get used to ;)
     
    sea otter, Sep 1, 2007 IP
  5. TwistMyArm

    TwistMyArm Peon

    Messages:
    931
    Likes Received:
    44
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #5
    While it is true that the file function is your better option, I figured that the answer as to why your initial code didn't work may help you in the future...

    The thing about single quoted strings in PHP is that not only are variables not interpreted, but neither are escape characters. That is to say while "\n" is a string containing a new line character, '\n' is a string containing a backslash followed by the letter 'n'.

    Hence, if you used "\n" it probably would have worked (for what it's worth, I haven't had my coffee yet and so am only 95% sure of my answer). That's also assuming that you were using UNIX type new lines, as opposed to Windows or Mac new lines...
     
    TwistMyArm, Sep 2, 2007 IP