Question

Hey Everyone. I’m a first time poster, but I’ve browsed this site a number of times. I have a coding issue that I’m not sure exactly how to solve. First I’ll explain what I need to do, and what information I have, and I hope somebody can give me a nudge in the right direction.

What I have is a spreadsheet (CSV) that has the following info: Zone Name, Zip Code, City Name. One zone should have many cities that fall under it, and every city most likely has many zip codes that fall under it. For example:

Zone H, 92603, Irvine

Zone H, 92604, Irvine

Zone J, 92625, Corona

etc.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I need to do with this info. I need to be able to input a city name and have it return to me all zip codes that fall under that city, as well as the zone that the city lies in. For example, if I input Chatsworth, it should give me (Zone X) and (12345, 12346, 12347) as the zip codes (just an example).

I’m not sure the best way to go about this. I could create a MySQL database and work from there, or just work from .csv files, or hardcode it into the PHP file. I don’t know how to search for a value in an array column, and then return the other columns accordingly (especially with multiple zip codes per city).

If anybody can help me out, it would be greatly appreciated. Also, feel free to let me know if you need more information from me. Thanks in advance to everyone reading.

Answer 1

Zone H, 92603, Irvine

Zone H, 92604, Irvine

Zone J, 92625, Corona

etc.

you can take the file and get all its contents. then split it up by new line:

$searchCity = 'Searched'; //or whatever city you are looking for
$file = file_get_contents('file.csv');
$results = array();
$lines = explode("\n",$file); 
//use any line delim as the 1st param,
//im deciding on \n but idk how your file is encoded

foreach($lines as $line){
    //split the line
    $col = explode(",",$line);
    //and you know city is the 3rd element
    if(trim($col[2]) == $searchCity){
         $results[] = $col;
    }
}

and at the end u have an array of the results like this:

$results = array(
   array('Zone B', '12345', 'Searched'),
   array('Zone Z', '35145', 'Searched'),
   array('Zone Q', '12365', 'Searched'),
)