Need help with a tricky string parsing/replacement

Ok, I have been pulling my hair out on this one and I am hoping someone will be able to point me in the right direction.

I am working with a web database for my company and I rather than enter in all of our 500 employees I was hoping to take our company list from a CSV and push it into my mySQL DB.

Here is what I have to work with :

"Ringger, Emily H."
"Roberts Kendall, Katelyn E."
"Robertson, John P."
"Robinson, Christopher S."
"Robinson, Tamara L"
"Rogers, Benjamin"
"Roque, Catherine R."
"Roseman, Monica M."
"Ross, Chelsey S."

What I need to do is break from down into first_name and last_name so I can import them into my DB. Problem I am facing is middle inital that sometimes have periods and sometimes do not. I have been able to clean it up, but I cannot get it into a format that is usable for me just yet.

So basically in the end I need to break each persons name into a variable $first_name and $last_name that can then go into my sql query.

ANY help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

Try doing this.

Use PHP's file() function to get the list into an array.
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php

You'll have to do 2 explodes, to get the data you need. First explode by a comma, which will give you last name, and then firstname and middle initial. Then explode by a space, and you will separate the first and middle. It may take a little logic to get a clean break, but shouldn't be too difficult.

$lines = file('/path/to/file');

foreach($lines as $num => $line)
{

$break= explode(",", $line);

$last = $break[0];

$break2 = explode(" ", trim($break[1]));

$last = $break2[0];

if($break2[1])
{

$middle = str_replace('.','',$break2[1]);

} else
{
$middle = '';
}

//Format or insert or whatever else here.

}

PHP:

You can then insert these directly, or format them however you need. This is untested but should work with or without minor modification. If the " are actually part of the string, you probably want to strip those off as well.

 

Input was

"Able, Cynthia A."
"Adams, Rowena D."

Output by echo "$last<br>"; produced

Cynthia
Rowena

Where do I call for their first names?

 

Try this:

$string= '
"Ringger, Emily H."
"Roberts Kendall, Katelyn E."
"Robertson, John P."
"Robinson, Christopher S."
"Robinson, Tamara L"
"Rogers, Benjamin"
"Roque, Catherine R."
"Roseman, Monica M."
"Ross, Chelsey S."
NAMES';

preg_match_all('/\"(.*),+[\s]+(.*?)[a-zA-Z]?[\.]?\"/',$string,$array);

foreach($array[1] as $key=>$value){
	echo $value." ".$array[2][$key]."<Br>";
}

PHP:

It does not have to be in a string. Can be placed in a csv files as stated.

Hope this helps
Cheers!

 

Actually I just played around with it and got it!!! Thanks a ton man, you are a life saver!