Question

I am looking for a suggestion on this:

I have a text file called movies.txt with about 900 lines, which contains one movie name per line. However, I would like to remove the year the movie has been released using PHP (which I am new to)

The format is basically:

A Nous la Liberte (1932)
About Schmidt (2002)
Absence of Malice (1981)
Adam's Rib (1949)
Adaptation (2002)
The Adjuster (1991)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Affliction (1998)
The African Queen (1952)

So I am looking for a way to open the text file, reading it line by line and removing the (YEAR) values while also removing the space before the (YEAR).

Then I would like to save it as newmovies.txt

Would be great if you could show and explain me a solution that works for my needs. I am still very new to PHP (started a week ago) so it’s all still magic to me.

Answer 1

You can read a file line-wise using the file() function. Then foreach over that and strip lines until the opening parenthesis.

For example

foreach (file($fn) as $line) {
     $output[] = strtok($line, "(");
}

You may need to trim the extra space and add linebreaks again.

So a regex might be simpler and also asserts some structure without blindly cutting things off:

$text = file_get_contents($fn);
$text = preg_replace('/\s*\(\d+\)/m', '', $text);
     #  \s* is for spaces and \d+ is a placeholder for numbers

Then save that back.