Home/ Questions/Q 6053359
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T08:01:54+00:00

I have a CSV that basically has rows that look like: 06444|WidgetAdapter 6444|Description: Here

  • 0

I have a CSV that basically has rows that look like:

06444|WidgetAdapter 6444|Description:

Here is a description.
Maybe some more.
|0

The text in the third field is always different and varying, and I’m trying to replace all newlines within it only with <br>, so it ends up as

06444|WidgetAdapter 6444|Description: <br>Here is a description.<br>Maybe some more.<br>|0

edit:

I basically need to get rid of all linebreaks so each line is a proper VALUE|VALUE|VALUE|VALUE. Normalize/beautify/clean it.

None of my tools can import this properly, phpMyAdmin chokes, etc.
There are linebreaks within the field, there are doublequotes that are not escaped, etc.

Example other field: 

08681|Book 08681|"Testimonial" - Person

You should buy this.|

Example of another field:

39338|Itemizer||
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you know you have 4 columns, you can easily parse your data. For example, here’s a PHP line that results in an array with all data. Each line in the array is another array with all capturing groups: [0] has the whole match, and [1]–[4] with each column:

    $pattern = '/^([^|]*)\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)$/m';
preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

    The pattern is extremely simple: it takes 4 values (not pipe signs), separated by 3 pipes. Once you have the data, you can easily rebuild it the way you want, for example by using nl2br.
    Note that you cannot reliably parse the data if the first and last columns can also containg new lines.

    Working example: http://ideone.com/gG0K3

    • 0