Question

I am trying to search and replace special characters in strings that I am parsing from a csv file. When I open the text file with vim it shows me the character is <95> . I can’t for the life of me figure out what character this is to use preg_replace with. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris Edwards

Answer 1

Following Bobince’s suggestion, the following worked for me:

analyse_file() -> http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php#101238

function file_get_contents_utf8($fn) {
    $content = file_get_contents($fn);
    return mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($content, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true));
}


if( !($_FILES['file']['error'] == 4) ) {
    foreach($_FILES as $file) {
        $n = $file['name'];
        $s = $file['size'];
        $filename = $file['tmp_name'];
        ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings',TRUE); // in case Mac csv
        // dealing with fgetcsv() special chars
        // read the file into a string, do your pre-processing changes
        // write it back out to a temporary file, and have fgetcsv() read that.
        $file = file_get_contents_utf8($filename);
        $tempFile = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), '');
        $handle = fopen($tempFile, "w+");
        fwrite($handle,$file);
        fseek($handle, 0);
        $filename = $tempFile;      
        // END -- dealing with fgetcsv() special chars
        $Array = analyse_file($filename, 10);
        $csvDelim = $Array['delimiter']['value'];
        while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, $csvDelim)) !== FALSE) {
            // process the csv file
        }
    } // end foreach
}